Ron Paul: why he could win.

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The reality is that the wired internet "masses" who are supporting Ron Paul are a very small part of the electorate. In 2000, the wired internet masses (Moveon.org) were in favor of John Kerry. They didn't push him over the top then either.
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It was sufficient to secure him the party's nomination.

The nature of Paul's support, I suspect, indicates that a blizzard on January 8 means that he'd sew up the NH primary, because his supporters would crawl over broken ice to vote for him. The same can't be said of Gun-Grabber Guiliani, Fred "Sominex" Thompson, Mitt "Taxachusetts" Romney, or Mike "Give Me Any Tax" Huckabee.
 
The entire foundation of your argument has already been thoroughly debunked. Your vaunted random polling has already firmly established it's track record of uselessness in the primaries. If you don't understand why this is to be expected, you don't understand how primaries work.
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You are welcome to your opinion. I remain firm in mine.

You won't convince me, and I won't convince the Ron Paulites who have drunk the cool-aid.

I suggest that we revisit this thread after the Republican convention. If Ron Paul gets more than a double digit percentage of the delegates, I'll buy you a beer. When he doesn't, I'll re-open this thread to say I told you so.
 
In the larger world, many Republicans seem to want nothing to do with Ron Paul or his supporters or ideas.

That may not seem like such a good idea after someone else is nominated...

Send a bunch of motivated potential allies elsewhere. Not smart.
 
It was sufficient to secure him the party's nomination.
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No, it wasnt' the fringe internet kooks who got him the nomination. It was a combination of who else was running and most of the democratic base.

Your vaunted random polling has already firmly established it's track record of uselessness in the primaries. If you don't understand why this is to be expected, you don't understand how primaries work.
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Ok, so then what method of polling should we use to determing who is winning?
 
i sure hope this feller don't win the primary! if he does Hitlery is a shoe in and we are proverbially screwed! As much as 2A is important to me it is the general state of affairs I am most concerned with. heck she may have our military disbanded before she has to buy our soldiers plane tickets home. NWO is another threat we will face. As it is she has a chance against anyone of the republican possibles. I think we should all intend to get the most electable man on the ticket and than vote for him. All the dems have to do is point out that Ron Paul lives in a fantasy land and he will be beaten worse than Jimmy Carter by Ronald Regan. He has a couple neato ideas but has no clue how they would be implemented. Heck I wish Ross Perot woulda won and wasted a good vote as did many which I think put Klinton in office in the first place.
Brent
 
Stage2,
Ok, so then what method of polling should we use to determing who is winning?
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That's what I've been trying to tell you; this is a primary. There is no reliable polling method to determine who is "winning" other than the results themselves.
If you want to gauge support (which doesn't guarantee a win either) you have to count individual donors, lawn signs, rally attendance, straw poll results, and volunteers on the ground. If people are going to all the trouble to to do this stuff, you can best believe that they'll (as said in another thread) crawl over broken ice in a NH blizzard to vote for their guy.
Your average constituent, otoh, is undecided and not particularly engaged yet. Most of 'em (who bother to show up) don't make up their minds until they enter the booth. Despite what the polls tell you, nobody (not even they themselves) can tell you who they'll vote for until it comes time to actually do it.
The media, however, has to report something on the horse race, and they can't go to all the trouble to gauge support, so they gauge name recognition instead (which is completely meaningless).
This is why primaries so often result in upsets. I'm not saying that this primary will result in an upset....but I'm not sayin' it won't either.
 
No, it wasnt' the fringe internet kooks who got him the nomination. It was a combination of who else was running and most of the democratic base.
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Well, look who else is running in the Republican primaries - a Rudy "gun-grabber" Guiliani, Mitt "Taxachusetts" Romney, Mike "Give Me Any Tax!" Huckabee, Fred "Sominex" Thompson, John "Screw the First Amendment" McCain...

And Duncan Hunter, who's polling much more close to fractions than Ron Paul.
 
That's what I've been trying to tell you; this is a primary. There is no reliable polling method to determine who is "winning" other than the results themselves.
If you want to gauge support (which doesn't guarantee a win either) you have to count individual donors, lawn signs, rally attendance, straw poll results, and volunteers on the ground. If people are going to all the trouble to to do this stuff, you can best believe that they'll (as said in another thread) crawl over broken ice in a NH blizzard to vote for their guy.
Your average constituent, otoh, is undecided and not particularly engaged yet. Most of 'em (who bother to show up) don't make up their minds until they enter the booth. Despite what the polls tell you, nobody (not even they themselves) can tell you who they'll vote for until it comes time to actually do it.
The media, however, has to report something on the horse race, and they can't go to all the trouble to gauge support, so they gauge name recognition instead (which is completely meaningless).
This is why primaries so often result in upsets. I'm not saying that this primary will result in an upset....but I'm not sayin' it won't either.
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Well then here is your homework assignment. Look up that last few presidential primaries and look at who was the frontrunner and how many times they actually won the nomination assuming no one else was within either the statistical margin of error or close to it.


Well, look who else is running in the Republican primaries - a Rudy "gun-grabber" Guiliani, Mitt "Taxachusetts" Romney, Mike "Give Me Any Tax!" Huckabee, Fred "Sominex" Thompson, John "Screw the First Amendment" McCain...
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For people who don't like it when others call Paul names, you sure have an interesting way of setting an example.
 
CNN coverage for tonight's debate.
Looks like Ron Paul is getting his blimp.

Well then here is your homework assignment. Look up that last few presidential primaries and look at who was the frontrunner and how many times they actually won the nomination assuming no one else was within either the statistical margin of error or close to it.
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Here's *your* homework assignment: try the search function and find the thread where I already cited this information.
 
Ron Paul has as much chance of winning the Republican nomination as Dennis Kucinich has of winning the Democratic nomination. That is: zero, nada, zilch.

And I think that's too bad! Here is one voter who would just love to see those two duke it out at the tops of their tickets. :D
 
Here's *your* homework assignment: try the search function and find the thread where I already cited this information.
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I wasn't being sarcastic. I really want to know, and I'd like actual figures.

I'm willing to bet virtually every time the person who won the nomination was either the front runner or someone very close behind. That was the case with Bush/McCain some 8 years ago and I'm willing to bet that most, if not all of the primaries turned out this way is well.
 
You would be incorrect. Last time around was Dean/ Kerry, which had the eventual winner buried in the noise floor prior to Iowa. And while the McCain/ Bush polling was closer, it was still outside the MoE.
Here's an old article talking about the funny year of 1980 and why the polling failed (still just as true today).
Time magazine. The data is revealing (and what you asked for), but the analysis is even more pertinent:
The difficulty, says Clark, is that those polled represent the entire electorate, not those who will actually vote. "No one has found a reliable way of identifying those people most likely to come out to vote," explains Clark. "In general elections, people remember voting before, and you can rely on their memories. They tend to forget their own behavior patterns in previous primary elections."...
The real problem is that since polling can assess the views of a body of voters but not which of those voters will actually vote, a preprimary sampling is only an approximation of what is likely to happen. Any politician or pundit who attributes to such a poll more accuracy or importance than it can realistically have does so at his own risk.
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This is a pattern that has repeated throughout the history of random polling.
not-so-great moments in polling history

yet more data

The lesson is obvious: Only ameteurs and the intellectually lazy rely on these polls as indicators of anything.
And again (just to clarify), I'm not predicting anything at all. I'm just saying that the only thing these primary polls have ever reliably established is their own unreliability. If you want to know who's ahead, pay attention to what's going on on the ground in the early states.
 
Who won the debate?

According to the CNN poll this morning, Ron Paul won the debate last night by a large margin.

Its settled, then.
 
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