Andrew Cline writes in the Wall Street Journal that Ron Paul may end up giving the GOP quite a surprise next Tuesday:
Many Republican operatives in New Hampshire, even those affiliated with other campaigns, think Mr. Paul is headed for an impressive, double-digit performance. That he has been polling in the high single digits for months is discounted, because the polls may be missing the depth of his support.
Why? For starters, he appears to be drawing new voters. Polls that screen for “likely” voters might screen out many Paul supporters who haven’t voted often, or at all, before. Many of Mr. Paul’s supporters appear to be first-time voters. They will be able to cast their ballots because New Hampshire allows them to register and vote on the day of an election.
(…)
There is another reason to discount the polls on Mr. Paul. The one thing that unites his supporters is a desire to be left alone, not only by government, but by irritating marketers and meddling pollsters, too. Mr. Paul’s supporters might well be screening their calls and not-so-inadvertently screening out pollsters.
I’ve long suspected that Ron Paul would do better in New Hampshire than the polls have been showing, and that a double-digit finish was in the cards. Whether the “hidden” support for Paul can be enough to push him into a third place finish, though, is another question.
At the moment, the Realclear Politics poll averages for New Hampshire show Paul in fifth place behind Giuliani and Huckabee, but with Huckabee’s boom (which never really materialized in New Hampshire) fading and Giuliani’s campaign far from being the shoe-in he seemed only three short months ago, a third place finish is not out of the question.
December 31st, 2007 at 1:58 pm
This especially hodls true if, as I predicted, Paul finishes in fifth in Iowa (ahead of Giuliani).
December 31st, 2007 at 3:36 pm
It would be great to see first time voters and young voters come out. Unfortunately, they always seem to find other priorties on election night. I’ve asked a few young people in Maryland what it would take to get them out to vote. Invariably they say that it would have to be ‘cool’ to vote before 20 somethings would prioritize the activity.
Ron Paul is a lot of things, but his fanatics have hardly made supporting him seem ‘cool’.
December 31st, 2007 at 6:01 pm
There is a reason that there are “likely voters”. They are the ones who do show up regularly to elections, particularly primaries. While these polls are also not decisive, they tend to run a lot more accurately than those polls going to everyone.
Most of the supporters of Ron Paul that I am aware of are younger than 25, a voting bloc that never exceeds the votes of any other group. I am 24 myself, but have voted in every general election and a couple primaries since I turned 18. My 21 year old brother, who supports Ron Paul, has voted once before (out of three general elections). Ron Paul may seem “cool”, as Mona stated, but I wonder how many younger voters are even aware of the primary date in their state.
As long as Ron Paul fails to reach the base of Republican voters, this will be a losing battle; even Rudy Giuliani, who is clearly not a conservative, appears to have more support from the Republican base.
January 1st, 2008 at 10:03 am
CR:
What prompts you to vote? What do your friends do while you’re voting? Do you know what would prompt them to vote?
I’m quite a bit older but have probably never missed the oppty to vote since I turned 18.
January 1st, 2008 at 10:47 am
I remain impressed with Ron Paul’s leadership. He is the only candidate who is proposing real restructuring of our currently leviathan government that will help return our federal government back to within its Constitutional limits.
Those who fear these types of changes either have not read about Dr. Paul (RonPaul2008.com) or perhaps they have some interest in maintaining the status quo. I can see that it would be very hard for someone who has fed from the federal trough for their entire lives, to conceive of what life could be like if giant, useless bureaucracies, like the Department of Education, were eliminated and those funds returned to the local communities.
History teaches that when large bureaucracies were removed and the funds returned to the people, the citizens and their communities prospered. So, there is a sound basis for Dr. Paul’s, less government, stand.
As President, Ron Paul would surely not get his way on every issue, but he would surely be a President who would work within the Constitution. If we just follow the Constitution, the People will prosper. Ron Paul may be our last chance to get America back under control of our citizens.
I hope that Americans will see through the smear campaigns mounted by some of Ron Paul’s opponents. Getting America back to Constitutionally based governance is not the “crazy” idea that opposition wags try to make it out to be. This election comes down to a rather clear choice: Do Americans want an Imperial Presidency (like Bush, Clinton, etc.) or do we want a return to our Constitutional based government, where power is checked by the three independent branches of government, Executive, Supreme Court and Congress.
January 4th, 2008 at 12:46 am
Ron Paul did pretty much as I expected him to do. I think those claiming he will win in a “landslide” are deluding themselves with their hopes. I had hoped he’d come in third, in which he would have basically been considered the big winner, but the distance between Paul and third was not very big.
What made me angrier than anything however, is the joke that is CNN. Now I typically read CNN because I find their site a little more bearable than Fox News or MSNBC’s cluttered mess. But WTF - when covering the results, instead of putting Ron Paul’s percentage on their pie charts, they put a grey area with no name on it. Paul did only 2-3% worse than Thompson and McCain (10% of the vote) - I think he and his supporters deserved to at least have his name appear in their pie chart. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I really am beginning to believe that the mainstream media is bunk. No more CNN for me.
Furthermore, the mainstream media paid no mention to the fact that 10% is significantly better than all their polls were predicting for Paul (he was in the mid-single digits just yesterday, if I remember right? In fact, it’s almost twice as much as they were predicting in Iowa.) Obama and Huckabee’s decisive wins (by around 9% each over the next in line) when just yesterday they were in a supposed dead heat proves that the media has no idea what they are doing, and that they’ve pretty much been wasting our time with their predictions and their agendas for the past 3 months.