The Democratic Party of Korea on the 16th will hold the Seoul and Gyeonggi primaries as the final stop of the Aug. 17 national convention's traveling races to choose the next leadership.
With party leader candidate Kim Min-seok having secured the upper hand by winning a majority in the South Jeolla–Gwangju and North Jeolla primaries held the previous day, attention in the market is focused on whether candidate Jung Chung-rae can overturn the trend today.
The Democratic Party will hold back-to-back joint campaign speeches for the traveling primaries at Suwon Sports Complex Indoor Gymnasium in Gyeonggi in the morning and at KINTEX in Goyang, Gyeonggi, in the afternoon. In addition to candidate Song Young-gil and the two party leader candidates, Jung Chung-rae and Kim Min-seok, candidates for the supreme council race—Choi Min-hee, Kim Yong, Kim Young-ho, Seo Mi-hwa, Han Min-su, Lee Sung-yoon, Park Sun-won, and Lim Mi-ae—are also scheduled to present their platforms.
After the speeches, the results of the rights party members' vote in Seoul and Gyeonggi will be released. Earlier, the Democratic Party held online voting from the 12th to the 13th, followed by ARS voting from the 14th to the 15th.
Kim won by a wide margin the previous day in Honam, another key battleground in this primary. Until just before the Honam primary, the gap in the cumulative vote share between first-place Kim and second-place Jung (excluding the 5% weighting for South Gyeongsang, Daegu, and North Gyeongsang) was only 1.48 percentage points (p). But in the Honam rights party members' vote, Kim took 57.54%, beating Jung, who had 32.65%, by 24.89 percentage points. Kim has widened the cumulative gap with Jung to 14.07 percentage points.
However, the fact that the turnout among rights party members in Seoul and Gyeonggi is higher than in Honam remains a variable. Online turnout in Gyeonggi and Seoul was 46.74% and 45.31%, respectively. That is about 10 percentage points higher than the turnout in South Jeolla–Gwangju (37.63%) and North Jeolla (35.22%).
Some observe that if Jung wins big by more than 20 percentage points in Seoul and Gyeonggi—which account for about one-third of all rights party members—as in Honam, it could set the stage for a comeback.
After completing the Seoul–Gyeonggi traveling primaries that day, the Democratic Party plans to add the results of the public opinion poll, which accounts for 30% of the overall vote, along with the delegate vote, and announce the final winner on the 17th.