If you're a new candidate running a political campaign for office against an incumbent, you might realize something while you are pouring over past election statistics and voter lists: that your opponent is a politician who may be unbeatable.

There are many competent, popular and experienced politicians who know how to win election campaigns. Your analysis may show you that you can't win. This, too, is worth knowing because you don't want to get into a campaign against a politician who you can't beat.

If the votes aren't there, they aren't there. If you have to rely on the "heart attack strategy," where your only chance of winning depends on your opponent dying of a heart attack, then perhaps you shouldn't file petitions to run a political campaign.

There are, on the other hand, many politicians who are jerks and who can be easily picked off by a competent political campaign. If your opponent is one who can be picked off, it will show in the election statistics. They will show you exactly where and how you can do it. If there is an open seat with no incumbent, and you're looking for the edge, the election statistics will show you where it can be found.

Reviewing election statistics is a subjective kind of analysis, of course, and whether or not you win is often a very iffy question.

Realistically, your analysis is most likely to indicate that you might have a chance at winning your campaign against an incumbent politician, might be able to reach that magic number if everything goes right.

It won't go all go right in your political campaign, but even at that, if your analysis leads you to believe that you might win, then you should go for it. The election statistics will tell you what it takes to win, what the target number is, and where those votes are. But you should be careful about how you circulate your petitions, and the following story should illustrate that.

In April of 1992, there was an article on the op-ed page of the New York Times (not a campaign endorsement, in this case) written by Larry Rockefeller, who wanted to run in the Republican campaign primary for U.S. Senator and had circulated nominating petitions. He complained bitterly in the article that when he filed his petitions with the board of elections they used every petty defect in form to invalidate the campaign petition.

If they found one bad signature, instead of not counting it, they threw out the whole petition and all the good names with it. As a result of this hanky-panky, Rockefeller did not get on the ballot or get the chance to run a political campaign.

Larry Rockefeller is a scion of one of the best-known Republican political campaign families in America and a man with sufficient resources to challenge any shenanigans in court, and they still did a job on him and his nominating petitions. The saddest part is that it was all legal. Think about that. If they can do it to him, the same thing can happen to you.

While there are as many variations as there are states, getting on the ballot to run a Republican campaign for office is ordinarily done by nominating petitions. A person seeking to run for an office goes to the elections office and obtains the petition forms for that office. He fills out the petition form as candidate and signs it. In some states, the candidate's signature must be notarized.

Underneath the Republican campaign candidate's part of the form there are lines for people, who must be registered voters, to sign their names petitioning that the candidate's name be put on the ballot. The candidate obtains the signatures of the required number of voters on his petitions and files them with the elections office. The board checks the petition to see if the names are valid, and if the petitions contain the required number of signatures.

If so, they certify the petition, and the Republican candidate's name is put on the ballot to run in the upcoming political campaign. This is how it is done, in theory. In practice, though, it can often be another matter entirely.