Kim Min-seok wins Gangwon and Daegu-Gyeongbuk primaries; Jeong Cheong-rae falters, misspeaks including confusing the president's name

Analysts say the race is turning out differently from what Jeong had expected.

Jeong Cheong-rae's support rate is not far behind Kim Min-seok's for now, but his campaign is not going as smoothly as it had expected.

In each regional primary, the results have fallen short of the vote shares he had anticipated, and his campaign is struggling.

As the primaries went on, Jeong Cheong-rae had increasing difficulty keeping his composure. In particular, during a speech he misspoke, calling the sitting president Lee Myung-bak. This resembles a slip he made near the end of the local elections in Jeonbuk, when he referred to President Lee Jae-myung in a way suggesting he would go to prison. These slips appear to show that Jeong is under considerable psychological pressure and stress.

This suggests the momentum of the primary has tilted toward Kim.

Jeong Cheong-rae is also believed to recognize this trend himself.

The campaign had counted mainly on turnout among male party members in their 40s and 50s, but female turnout turned out to be high.

Jeong later made an appeal to female voters in Honam, but critics say the response came too late.

Major media outlets are still reporting the race as a close contest, with a gap of just 1.48 percentage points between Kim Min-seok and Jeong Cheong-rae. NewsTamsa, however, announced that its model puts Kim's chances of winning above 90%.

NewsTamsa says its prediction combines last year's vote counts, opinion polls, and the current counting trends, and that running simulations on all of these puts Kim's probability of winning above 90%.

Jeong Cheong-rae's campaign has acknowledged its weakness in Honam, but judged that it could make up the difference elsewhere. Internally, the campaign expected to win narrowly or comfortably in every region outside Honam.

However, counting results from other regions have not matched expectations, and the campaign is flustered. It had believed it could recover by narrowing the gap in Honam to about 10 percentage points, but vote shares elsewhere are falling short of its hopes.

In addition, the so-called 'shy Jeong' vote appears weaker than expected.

NewsTamsa had initially expected a 'shy Jeong' vote to exist, but so far Jeong's vote share has come in below opinion poll results in every region.