Tomorrow is election day in Carbon County

I have been working on election campaigns since 1960, and I still don’t know what works.  Tomorrow I will be standing at a polling place at the Palmerton Rod and Gun Club passing out slate cards.  The cards list all the Democratic candidates in Carbon County, and I will be urging people to vote the slate.  Slate cards are almost useless, affecting perhaps one percent of the voters.

But...think about how many elections are won by one percent.  

If you had to predict how a voter will vote and you could know only one variable, it would not be gender, income, race, religion, or educational level.  It would be party.  Most Republicans vote Republican; most Democrats vote for Democratic candidates. What about independents?  Most of them are not truly independent; they lean toward one party or another.  Since Carbon County has a majority of Republican registrants, Democratic candidates are at a definite disadvantage, although this year the Carbon County Republican Party is split down the middle, so Democrats have a better chance.

Most campaigning is playing with the margins.  Yard signs, newspaper ads, tv ads, direct mail, billboards–you try them all.  The best tactic for the candidate to go door-to-door and engage voters, but even that doesn’t work if the candidate is not personable.  You also will have a tough time meeting more than four or five candidates an hour.  

A consultant at a candidate school once explained that the worst elections are those you lose by one or two percentage points.  You lay awake at night thinking of all the ways you could have gotten that one or two percent.  He told us that you do everything possible; that way if you lose a close election, you tell yourself there was nothing else you could have done.  You will be able to fall asleep knowing that.