New leadership to steer the Democratic Party of Korea will be elected on the 17th. Attention is on whether Kim Min-seok, who called for stability, will rise to the chairmanship on the back of a win in the Honam region, or whether Jung Chung-rae, who pushed for reform, will stage a dramatic come-from-behind victory with a late surge.
The Democratic Party will hold its 3rd regular national convention at the Daejeon Convention Center on the afternoon of the day to elect a party chair and five elected supreme council members. The final results will be released by combining the vote of dues-paying members announced through the regional tour primaries with the delegate vote results to be released the same day, a public opinion poll, and a 5% weighting for the Yeongnam region turnout rate.
So far, in the cumulative vote share not reflecting the Yeongnam weighting, Kim leads with 49.91%. Jung has 41.41%, and Song Young-gil has 8.58%. The gap between Kim and Jung is 54,567 votes, or 8.40 percentage points.
The final point to watch is whether Kim secures a majority and whether Jung has a chance at a dramatic reversal. Kim won in both the Honam and Seoul metropolitan primaries but failed to secure a majority. If the combined polling result does not give any candidate a vote share of 50% or higher, the party will elect the chair using a preferential voting system.
Under the preferential voting system, voters mark their 1st to 3rd choices together, and if there is no majority winner, the 2nd-choice selections of voters who picked the lowest-ranked candidate as their 1st choice are added to determine the final winner. Because Kim and Song have formed a "pro-Myung" united front, Kim is likely to become party chair even if it goes to preferential voting.
A dramatic reversal scenario for Jung is not impossible. If Jung leads Kim by more than 20 percentage points in the general public opinion poll, which accounts for 30% of the final vote share, a comeback is possible.
The outcome for the supreme council members is also drawing interest. There are two points to watch. First, the key question is whether the "senior" supreme council seat, awarded to the top cumulative vote-getter, will go to the pro-Myung faction or the pro-Chung faction. In the cumulative vote share of dues-paying members, pro-Chung candidate Choi Min-hee leads with 16.91%, followed by Park Sun-won, seen as pro-Myung, with 16.60%.
Another focus is which side takes three of the five supreme council seats. Currently, within the top five likely to win, three are pro-Chung and two are pro-Myung. On the pro-Chung side, Choi Min-hee in first place, Lee Sung-yoon, and Han Min-soo are within the top five, while on the pro-Myung side, Park Sun-won and Seo Mi-hwa are in the group.
However, the gap between Han Min-soo in 5th and pro-Myung Kim Yong in 6th is just 0.15 percentage points. Pro-Myung candidates Lim Mi-ae and Kim Young-ho, who were in 7th and 8th, announced support for Kim Yong the previous day and withdrew from the race as a strategy to lift Kim Yong into 5th. If the pro-Chung faction takes three of the five supreme council seats, even if Kim Min-seok becomes party chair, the leadership will inevitably be undermined.
The vote results for the Democratic Party chair are scheduled to be released at 6 p.m.