I was stunned the first time someone said it to me.

''I like your ideas, I think you would do a great job in Congress, but I won't be voting for you because you can't win.''

The second time this happened to me, I was ready with my reply.

''If the people who like my ideas and who think I would do a great job in Congress, refuse to vote for me, OF COURSE I can't win.''

The look I got back was a puzzled gaze, as if to say, ''So what's your point?''

This happened often enough in my two primary runs for federal office that I knew this was not an isolated phenomenon. But was I the only one hearing it?

And then I saw it again, in print, in the Maine Sunday Telegram of June 16. Andrea Boland, a member of the Maine Citizen's Campaign in Sanford, was quoted as saying, ''I told some friends at work that I was going to vote for Jean Hay, and they said, 'You're not going to vote for someone who can't win, are you?'...It was kind of depressing.''

Tell me about it.

But maybe this phenomenon, of people deliberately not voting for the candidate they thought would do the best job, was confined to either me or the particular races I chose to run in. After all, I had never seen any political analysis of this startling mindset.

Then I shared my frustration with a friend who had worked for independent presidential candidate John Anderson in 1980. What he said provided the ''click'' of understanding, when suddenly illogical things start to make sense.

He said that, during that 1980 campaign, when pollsters asked the question ''Who is the best candidate for the job?'' Anderson came out on top all across the country. However, when the question was, ''If the election were held today, who would you vote for?'', the answers were very different.

Clearly people for years have been casting their votes on the basis of something other than whom they perceived to be the best candidate for the job.

Why? Some people told me that it was very important for them to be able to say that they voted for the winner, regardless of who that was.

To guarantee they were ''in with the in-crowd,'' such voters pay inordinate attention to pundit projections, and to the results of anonymous telephone polls, such as the WLBZ-WCSH (Channels 2 & 6) News-Center Bullet Poll. They use the analyses like an insider trading on a hot stock tip, to guarantee their personal success in the voting booth – that of picking the winner.

A June 19 Bangor Daily News editorial lauded the WLBZ poll for having ''developed a solid track record'' for accurately predicting election results.

But are they actually part of the phenomenon they are trying to predict?

As I read that editorial, I flashed on my high school science lab.

Remember your science teacher talking about inert beakers and measuring devices, cautioning against using equipment which would interact with the experiment and change the results? And remember being told to be clear about just what question your experiment was trying to answer, so you would end up with data which meant something?

I would venture to guess that the TV telephone pollsters feel that people vote as individuals, not as groupies, and that reporting the results of their surveys has a negligible impact on election results.

I also suspect that the pollster assumes that when the question asks who you plan to vote for, that it is also inherently asking who you think would be the best candidate for the job. As my Anderson volunteer made clear, that is a dangerous assumption.

I've got an idea. As the fall elections approach, I challenge WLBZ-WCSH to go straight to the heart of the matter in its bullet polling, and simply ask respondents who they think is the best candidate for the job in each race. And then report only that result.

Or, if that is too great a sea change, I suggest that the ''best candidate'' question be asked first, followed by ''who are you voting for?'' That way we can find out if an Anderson gap exists, and maybe even how big it is.

This is not an idle suggestion. We need this information.

We need to know if masses of voters are making decisions based upon an underground group dynamic, of a cultural need to be popular, rather than on rational, thoughtful pondering of what is in the best interests of the country.

We are currently in a fervor over campaign finance reform, yet this type of voter decision-making, if it is as widespread as I suspect, is something which no amount of caps or spending limits will be able to touch.

If voters are deliberately voting contrary to their own perceptions of who is the best candidate, then they are violating the whole concept of a representative democracy based on the collection of individual wisdoms.

And they have wasted my time and the time of every serious candidate who has dared to campaign on the strength of our ideas.
 

First published in:
The Bangor Daily News, ''Why some good candidates lose,'' June 25, 1996,
The Aroostook Democrat ''Pogo was Right,'' June, 1996, and
The Biddeford Journal Tribune, ''When elections are treated as horse races, the best often lose,'' June 27, 1996