Voting season venture.

• Author: Vatz, Richard E.
• Position: Ethical campaigning - Political Landscape

"Those who are opposed to all negativism in political campaigning either yearn for insipidity or advantage, but not the rightfully vaunted marketplace of ideas to determine the best candidates."

PURSUANT to Election Day, some rules, lessons, and advice are in order for those who wish to win by campaigning ethically:

Polls. For years we have argued that the lack of certainty provided by the public opinion polls should give confidence to those trailing, especially when the leader's support is of low intensity, such intensity being ascertainable by serious polling.

Many think the problem is the foolhardy relying on internal polls, but it always depends on which internal polls you are depending. Some pollsters working for politicians follow the Andrew Carnegie theory of polling counseling: tell your employer what he or she wants to hear. Other such pollsters, however, wanting to be the go-to opinion measurers for politicians, consider credibility their critical quality and tell their employers the truth and only the truth, as they know it.

In perhaps the most publicized polling error since Hillary Clinton's upset over the poll-leading Barack Obama in the 2008 New Hampshire primary, Eric Cantor was defeated by 11 points in Virginia by Tea Party candidate Dave Brat, despite several major polls evidencing Cantor ahead by double digits right up to the 2014 election.

In the Maryland gubernatorial election, wherein no Republican save former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich had won election for almost 50 years, GOP candidate Larry Hogan was behind Democratic Lieut. Gov. Anthony Brown in all major public opinion polls by two to three points, but the candidate's private polls had Hogan surging ahead at the end by two or three points. He won by five.

Public opinion polls assume that respondents invariably are similar to the populations they represent and that polls invariably are accurate at the precise time of polling, but there is no way to verify that, despite pollsters' impossible-to-prove assumption.

Candidates who live by the polls often die by the polls, especially when they play prevent defense by avoiding the major issues of a campaign, as did the surprise and surprised Maryland loser Brown.

Debates. Political debates (local, regional, and national) are like baseball stadiums: they are tailored for the advantage of a few, with rules and arrangements varying wildly to satisfy different interests of principals, citizens, media outlets, etc.

It is not an...