Taiwan's ruling party is pitching face-to-face contact and a wider economic safety net as the fix for a divided society, framing online hate as manufactured rather than deep-rooted.

• A Hoover Institution delegation, including democracy scholar Larry Diamond and retired four-star admiral James O. Ellis Jr., met DPP leaders in Taipei to press on how split the island's politics have become.
• Puma Shen, the DPP's Taipei mayoral candidate, said the anger is not a real clash over identity but hate campaigns pushed by algorithms and information operations, much of it tied to Chinese narratives.
• His answer is old-fashioned retail politics — morning walks through parks and markets, shaking hands with pan-blue voters who often tell him he seems far less extreme in person than online.
• Taipei's economy runs on services, so the party is also promising social housing, free childcare, child savings accounts and longer student loan grace periods to blunt the sense of being left behind.
• The government is putting up a NT$25 billion program to pull small traditional manufacturers — screw makers, metal shops — into the chip and drone supply chains.

Outlook: Expect Shen to keep running on de-polarization and shared prosperity as the Taipei mayoral race heats up, with the chip-boom spillover to old-line industry as his main economic promise.