Vote-Casting and Campaign Chaos in the 2024 Tokyo Election

The election to choose the Tokyo metropolitan governor, held on July 7, seemed to have less attention focused on the candidates in the running and more on the various sideshows associated with the contest—a wave of unserious candidates seeking online fame and a political organization flooding the field with dozens of candidates in order to make money off of the campaign poster space available to all election entrants.

In something of a continuation from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s losses of seats in three by-elections for the House of Representatives in April this year, this gubernatorial contest saw what might be termed “establishment politicians” at the mercy of forces they could not control—this time, an open hijacking of the election process by players not interested in winning the office.

In the end, despite all the drama, it was the incumbent Koike Yuriko who took a convincing lead to win her third term in the governor’s office. More surprising, perhaps, was the strong showing by second-place finisher Ishimaru Shinji, a former mayor of Akitakata, Hiroshima Prefecture.

The Social Survey Research Center, which I head, carried out a poll of voters on election day using the “d-Survey” online polling tool we developed jointly with the mobile communications firm NTT Docomo, which allows for random sampling from a pool of some 68 million people aged 18 and up nationwide. Our July 7 survey received valid responses from 2,588 voters who had cast their gubernatorial ballots either on election day or in advance. The results indicate that the winner, Koike, performed strongly as the “safe choice” for a broad set of voters, while Ishimaru achieved solid support from younger and nonaffiliated voters. The third-place finisher, Renhō, who left the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan to run, failed to perform up to expectations despite a strong undercurrent of disapproval for the LDP-led national government.

The results clearly show that Koike enjoyed support among all age brackets. Ishimaru enjoyed healthy support, coming in a strong second in all brackets up through age 59, thus producing his lead over Renhō; he was particularly popular among voters up through age 29, where he came close to besting Koike. The vote breakdown by gender, meanwhile, shows that male voters opted for Koike (40%) followed by Ishimaru (27%) and Renhō (18%), while a majority of female voters chose Koike (52%), followed by Renhō (19%) and Ishimaru (18%).

The figure below breaks down the voting by party supported by the voters. (The numbers by the party names are the percentages of total voters supporting each party.) The differences in voting between LDP and CDPJ supporters are starkly evident.

Voters with no party preference were clearly the decisive factor in the election, being the largest of these blocs. Among these voters, too, Koike was the winner, followed by Ishimaru and then more distantly by Renhō. Concurrently with our voter survey, we polled respondents on their support for the administration of Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, finding a mere 18% approval rating and a 67% disapproval rating. Among this larger, latter group, 34% cast their votes for Koike, 28% for Ishimaru, and 24% for Renhō. It is clear that most voters saw the question of Kishida’s government as something separate from the decision on who would be Tokyo’s next governor. (Indeed, voters saw fit to punish ruling and opposition parties alike in the contests to fill unoccupied seats in the metropolitan assembly, where only two out of eight LDP-backed candidates won seats and just one out of seven backed by the Japanese Communist Party and the CDPJ made it in.)

In a word, incidentally, Renhō’s failure to perform well in the election can be chalked up to her carrying the baggage of her party, the CDPJ—namely, her being saddled with its weaknesses. Weak among young voters and strong among the elderly, she would need to win overwhelmingly—with 60% or 70% of the votes cast—among the nonaffiliated voters that skew heavily toward older age brackets.

Voter Turnout Falls Alongside Community Participation

In addition to the votes garnered by each candidate, we must also pay attention to the overall voter turnout. The July 2024 election saw turnout climb some 5 percentage points from the previous 2020 contest to reach 60.62%. That election was of course carried out in extraordinarily adverse conditions, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Add to this the fact that most observers saw Koike’s reelection as a given at that time, and it is hardly surprising to see that the 2020 turnout was around 5 points lower than the 2016 election. This time, though, despite the pandemic having drawn to a close and the concurrent holding of contests for nine metropolitan assembly seats, we did not see the healthy bounce in turnout numbers that might have been expected. (Indeed, the largest group of voters overall—those declaring no party preference—accounted for around 60% of the total across a series of five polls the Social Survey Research Center carried out from the day campaigning formally started through the day before the election, just 49% of voters actually going to the polls on July 7 reported having no preference, a sign that many of these people stayed home.)

Recent years have seen a shift in voting patterns that is worth examining in the context of voter age brackets. The figure below compares voter turnout rates by age in the last two Tokyo gubernatorial elections, held in 2016 and 2020. Turnout among older voters, particularly those in their sixties and seventies, dropped considerably in the 2020 contest compared to four years previously. The overall turnout drop was 4.7 points, but for voters aged 60–64 it was more than double this, at 10.1 points down; it fell 11.2 points for those aged 64–69, 11.4 points for those aged 70–74, and 10.4 points for those aged 75–79. Turnout among younger voters, meanwhile, climbed markedly, with the rate up 8.8 points for 18-year-olds (who voted for the first time following a 2015 change in the law lowering the voting age from 20 to 18) and 5.6 points for 20-year-olds.

It is natural to see the fall in turnout among older voters from 2016 to 2020 as stemming from the pandemic. However, even in the summer of 2023, once COVID-19 had largely died down, the Saitama prefectural gubernatorial election saw similar drops in voting rates among older citizens compared to 2019, with turnout falling by 11.9 points for those aged 50–59, by 15.2 points for those aged 60–69, and a whopping 16.9 points for those aged 70–79. National elections have also seen a similar trend. Turnout in the city of Saitama in the 2022 House of Councillors election was 52.39% overall, a slight rise from the 48.11% marked in 2019, but this was due to climbs in the turnout among voters aged from 18 up through their forties; the turnout rate remained level for those in their sixties and fell for those in their seventies.

In Japan’s top-heavy population pyramid, these older generations represent the bulk of the voting population. Observers of regional elections around the country have already noted marked drops in turnout among middle-aged and older voters, but now this trend is growing apparent in Japan’s major urban centers as well. This seems to signify a decline for the standard model of Japan’s voting population, with a steadily rising average age thought to produce predictable outcomes. It will be most interesting to examine the voter turnout data by age for the 2024 Tokyo election once it is released.

In Japanese the term senkyo-banare, meaning disengagement from the electoral process, is usually used to describe voters’ dwindling interest in or willingness to take part in elections. We should note, though, that it also signifies an increasing lack of engagement on the part of candidates. The 2023 “unified local elections,” held in numerous districts across Japan in April that year, saw shortages of candidates in many locations resulting in uncontested wins for them in some districts. When not enough people step forward to give voters a meaningful choice, a drop in engagement can hardly be blamed on those voters alone.

Electoral Pathology: Casting Voters as Consumers

Falling turnout among older voters and shortages of candidates standing for election are both rooted in irreversible changes to the nature of local communities—namely, people’s growing dissociation from them. This means it will be extraordinarily challenging to find ways to reverse these trends.

On top of these issues, we have the new problem of “election hijacking” seen in Tokyo this year to grapple with. Information and imagery are tossed about on social media, and traditional media outlets scramble in turn to share these with their audiences. The election instantly becomes an entertainment event of nationwide proportions, with the actors and actresses (the candidates) performing almost like professional wrestlers, battling on the sidelines of the actual ring and engaging in various underhanded tricks. In a shocking contrast with the lack of candidates in other elections, the Tokyo contest saw the so-called Party to Protect the People from NHK field dozens of candidates, alongside numerous other unserious people tossing their hat into the ring solely to increase their fame, confronting us all with questions of how to control this chaos. It feels as though the hideous state of affairs on the candidates’ side has reached a point of no return with the 2024 Tokyo election.

I do not know what might be prescribed to address this illness, although the causes of the disease are relatively clear. Recent years have seen more and more people treating the electoral process as a marketplace, rolling out strategies and performances with a marketing mindset, rather than a focus on policy. The end result of a trend toward “marketing-style elections,” casting the electorate as little more than a body of consumers to woo, is the “hijacking” of the contest we saw in Tokyo this summer.

We must not allow voters to be treated as consumers.

(Originally published in Japanese on July 8, 2024. Banner photo: Tokyo Governor Koike Yuriko poses in Shinjuku, Tokyo, after winning her third term in office in the July 7 gubernatorial election. © Jiji.)