Blue-White cooperation has clearly hit a wall ahead of the nine-in-one elections — bad news for the Taiwan People's Party, and an opportunity for the Kuomintang to shore up its turf.

• The KMT is allocating votes across all six of Taipei's electoral districts, and Chiang Wan-an will not make individual campaign appearances for White Camp candidates; the White Camp's grassroots are pushing back but have little choice except to accept it.

• The Blue-White cooperation agreement signed in March covered only the mayoral and county magistrate races, not council seats, and the two sides have each interpreted it their own way — that is where the friction originates.

• Zhubei is the hardest piece to negotiate, with Huang Kuo-chang directing sharp words at Hsu Hsin-ying, while the KMT's Wu Hsu-chih leads in the polls.

• The TPP's high share of the vote in Zhubei is a two-year-old record; Ko Wen-je's court case and turmoil within the party have already cooled supporters' enthusiasm, and those votes will not transfer automatically.

• The party's influence in the Legislative Yuan is also shrinking: its euthanasia referendum failed to win Blue Camp backing and was left by the wayside.

Outlook: if the White Camp does not go back to cultivating grassroots organisational votes and relies solely on publicity material and online buzz, both Taipei and Zhubei could prove harder to contest at year's end than it expects.