Since a majority of one - yourself- holds all of your views, I think you may legitimately avoid any issue which is quite irrelevant to the duties you will be called on to perform. But don't kid yourself nor let any candidate of yours kid himself; the duties of any lawmaker, judge, or chief executive are extremely broad; the duties of some other offices are quite narrow.
How to Sample a District: Mr. Upright's campaign for the nomination has reached the last month. You have worked hard but how well, in fact, are you doing? Should you put on more steam, or fold up and quit the race?
You can't afford the services of the Gallup poll or other professionals; your volunteers can't spare the time from direct campaigning. To be sure, they are giving you a poll of sorts, at each meeting of the Doorbell Club, but what you want now is a check on their reports. You know from experience that the reports of the field workers are usually too rosy.
There is a technique which must be learned by experience but which you may start learning as soon as you enter politics; by the time you reach a place where it matters you can be quite skilled. It consists of making predictions for all candidates and issues on the ballot for each election, both before and after some direct sampling of your own, and keeping a record of the results, which you will then compare with the election returns.
From this you will learn whether you are too optimistic or too pessimistic; subconsciously you will improve your judgment until you reach a point where you can go out into a district and almost smell a victory or a defeat weeks ahead of the event. When you can do this you are in a position to turn a potential defeat into a victory.
Make your predictions at regular intervals, from filing date to the night before the election. File them away, then get them out during the post-mortem. The whole procedure is much more entertaining than cross-word puzzles; addicts prefer it to trying to pick the horses, or to reading detective stories.
Statistical Sampling: Even if you could afford professional poll-taking, supervised by mathematical statisticians, the money is better spent on campaigning. Does this mean you have to go it blind, perhaps to work your head off for a lost cause, or lose by a narrow margin when a small additional effort would have won -had you known it was necessary?
No, there is a fairly easy and inexpensive way to conduct a poll on a district of any size, even the largest, which will give you reliable data on which to judge how well your campaign is going and then to plan accordingly.
The secret of correct prophecy by statistical sampling of a large number of units lies first in the correctness of the methods by which you sample and second in not trying to get out of the figures more than there is in them.
The mathematical theories of probability, chance, and probable error are complicated and abstruse. Instead of trying to give a course in this subject I shall content myself with stating a thumb rule, giving some instructions on how to use the rule, and offering a few general comments on the mathematical methods whereby the rule was derived. Only the thumb rule need be remembered to apply die method successfully; the mathematical comments are for the mathematically-minded reader who may wish to check the derivation of the rule and, possibly, enter into a litde stimulating controversy with the writer as to dieory, or as to the possibility of formulating a better thumb rule for the purpose.
Rule: Poll your district at "random" (identified below) until you have fifty responsive answers - answers either for you or against you, disregarding those who refuse to answer or haven't made up their minds. Take die number of answersybr your candidate and double it. Subtract eight. Mark your answer as a percentage. The chances are about four-to-one that your candidate would not receive less than this percentage of die vote cast if the election were held at once and diere is a practical certainty that he would not fall very far under this figure. Use it as if it were a certainty. It is, in fact, a carefully calculated conservative estimate on die "better-be-safe-dian-sorry" principle.
Example: You have taken a poll of 93 voters of your party, selected at random, before you attain 50 responses-14 declined to answer, 29 had made no choice. Of the 50, 28 were for Upright; 22 were for Hopeful. Doubling 28 gives you 56; subtracting 8 leaves 48: Upright may expect to get not less dian 48% of die vote cast if die election were held at once. It is equally true diat he might get as high as 56 plus eight or 64% of the vote, but you are not interested in the optimistic side of the picture; you want to know what you have to achieve to cinch die election - dierefore you use 48% as your figure.
Forty-eight percent is not enough; if he loses by 2% he loses-it's an emergency.
Two percent of the expected vote of 25,000 is 500 votes; you must speed up the campaign to get at least 500 more votes dian your present activity insures - so you shoot for about three times that number. You call an emergency meeting of die Doorbell Club and show diem only die 48% figure and tell diem that means diat each one will have to dig out about six more new votes dian he had counted on, by punching additional doorbells not on the selected list until he finds six more who can be wheedled into voting in the primary. You put Upright on a 60-hour week for die balance of die campaign and you decide to spend four afternoons a week at doorbell-pushing yourself, instead of two, even diough it means doing your paperwork on midnight oil.
The spurt lasts three weeks but it wins for you - when you might have lost by a heart-breakingly small margin. Perhaps you win by a fat margin and perhaps the spurt was not really necessary - you will never know but it does not matter; you've won.
Suppose your poll shows a conservative estimate of more than 50%; you are then justified in continuing your present campaign plans, without an emergency spurt but without slackening off.
Suppose the poll had been the other way around, 22 for Upright; 28 for Hopeful - your conservative estimate is then 36%. Does this mean you should quit? No, for Hopeful's conservative estimate is still less than 50%. It means a tough fight with a possibility, but not much probability, of winning. Stick with it.
Suppose Hopeful got 30 votes in the poll, indicating that he will probably beat your man by at least 52% of the vote and that he might take as high as 68% of the total. Should you throw in the sponge?
Not on your own initiative - I recommend that you talk it over with your candidate, then call a closed meeting of all workers and all money contributors, tell them the sad news and ask them to express their wishes. From a cold-blooded standpoint you might as well cut your losses and quit... but I predict that they will vote to stick to the finish and turn the meeting into a rally. They may even win for you. Politics isn't dice, nor statistical physics; the Spirit of the Alamo may outweigh all measurable factors.
If they decide to stick, bow to their will and pitch in. It will be a treasured emotional experience at least - and many a "lost" campaign has planted the seed for an eventual political upheaval.
The Meaning of "Random": A "random" sample is one which is as truly representative of the district as you can make it. This is most easily done by trying to keep out the personal element in the selections. For example - you want 100 names from 200 precincts: Take the bottom name, of your party, from the second column of each-even numbered precinct list. Or make up any other rule which makes the selection mechanical, with no choice on the part of the operator, and which spreads the sample evenly through the district, according to population, not area.
Never take the sample all from one precinct or one area. If you are polling by telephone you will find that some of your choices do not have telephones. Do not substitute the next name having a telephone listing; the voters without telephones must be polled at their homes - otherwise you will introduce an economic factor which will falsify your answer.