Getting good, solid statistics from the last few election campaign results in the race you plan on running in lets you determine a lot of information that will help you win at the polls. With this information, you'll be able to determine which precincts are favorable to candidates from your party regardless of the individual candidate's strength.

Additionally, this valuable election campaign information will let you see which precincts are unfavorable to candidates in your party, where the swing voters are located, and which have an issue that might motivate voters at the polls on election day.

You can build on the base of voters who identify with you in your election campaign because your party affiliation, but you cannot presume on them. You will have to campaign to these people, but elections are won and lost by reaching the swing voters, the people who are up for grabs.

A successful candidate must take his election campaign to the swing voters. Once you have determined what your base vote will be, you can see how many swing voters you will need to win. The statistics will tell you where they are.

You have to go through the campaign statistics, precinct by precinct, and think to yourself, "I can get so many votes in this precinct, but not so many in this one, and I will lose by a lot of votes in the other one" and so forth. When you have done your precinct-by-precinct analysis, you will have a much better idea of how you can get that magic number of votes.

After choosing a political campaign slogan in your race for office, your next step as a candidate should be to get your hands on elections statistics from the last two or three cycles. The election statistics will tell you the results in the last elections, the total number who voted, the number who voted in your race, the number who voted in similar races.

With this information, you come up with an average number of people who are likely to vote in your race. Divide that by two, and you have you target number of votes to win your political campaign.

Once you have picked your number, you have to sit down with your campaign people and decide how you are going to get to that number, precinct by precinct. If the people in Ward Three Precinct C are madder than hell about the sewers backing up, you can look to getting some votes there.

If, on the other hand, they just had a testimonial dinner for the councilman at the new recreation center he had built in the ward, and 500 people showed up, you can forget about winning there.

Try to locate the swing precincts, that is, the precincts with swing voters. Few people are voting a straight ticket nowadays, but party affiliation still counts to some extent. Even many who call themselves Independents still tend, all things being equal, to vote more for candidates of one party more than the other. A swing voter can be defined as one who votes for the particular candidate, but not on the basis of party affiliation.