He’s a fringe candidate, period. Look, folks; it’s Coke or Pepsi. Diet Pineapple Fanta isn’t going to win, ever. I would personally love for there to be a Third Way, but those unelected powers who benefit most from the status quo prefer us to be fairly evenly divided so there’s not much movement either way. These days, if a third party candidate ever polled more than 40%, they’d probably be assassinated, figuratively if not literally.
I think that 2% would probably be pushing it. 5% is probably a pipe dream. 10% would almost definitely require divine intervention.
Accurately determining the level of support for Paul is difficult at best due to tactics like anonymizers and various other dirty little tactics. It certainly seems, as Wired has pointed out, that many of Paul’s supporters’ general scumfuckery has led to him getting more name recognition than his campaign would otherwise deserve.
There are a few objective measures, like how much cash he’s been able to raise at certain points… but that’s tricky as well. For instance, the 4.2 million “money bomb” raised in conjunction with Guy Fawkes day :rolleyes: was contributed by roughly 37,000 donors. Even if we round that to 40,000, and assume that there were ten times as many supporters as donors, we’ve still got something less than half of a percent of voters in a given election.
Even the recent “money bomb” that topped out at about six million had only 58,407 donors. Again, even if we were to posit that such support represented only 1/20 of Paul’s total support, we’d still be somewhat less than 1% of 2004’s voter turnout, IIRC. Even if it is only 1/100th of Paul’s support, it would still only be about 5% of 2004’s voter turnout (if my back of the napkin math is accurate). Even if we use 2000’s voter turnout as a baseline, the percentages don’t change by all that much.
A recent (non-bot-spammable) poll, while finding that Republican voters were largely open to changing their minds, didn’t even have Paul score high enough to rate mention of his name. I don’t have all the polls at my fingertips right now, but IIRC, Paul has consistently polled horribly in any poll that can’t be fucked with via internet trickery. A recent CNN poll, for instance, has had Paul at 1 or 2% for months with him now climbing to 6%… with a sampling error of +/- 5%.
Other results in the same poll were interesting, as many people in this country still vote based on 'electability '. When asked about candidates who had a chance to beat the Dem nominee, only 2% said tha Paul was the guy (up from 1%). A candidate with a perception of ‘unelectability’ among his own party may not stand much of a chance even if he jumps ship. While a non-zero percentage of Americans still go for protest votes, I can’t see a sizeable percentage tossing their votes to Paul come crunch time. Heck, even Perot didn’t do all that well, and after his initial defeat, his influence began to plummet. And that was with him polling very well and being invited to the debates in his first go-round.
Added to all that, there are various other tidbits, like Paul’s refusal to return St-rmfr-nt’s Don Black’s donation.
He has, as of yet, failed to make any high publicity statement decrying the use of his banners on sites like St-rmfr-nt. Equally troublesome for Paul’s campaign (if it ever actually looked like a threat to any major political power) was a message, originally posted, I believe, at VNN (hell no, no link) claiming that Paul was a neo-Nazi. The truth of the message doesn’t matter. It was posted by Bill White, the “Commander of the American Nazi party.” That’s some pretty damaging stuff, whether or not it’s true. That some of Paul’s supporters have gone absolutely batshit insane with racist lunacy in order to rebut those charges definitely presents a minefield that Paul would have to walk through were he to rise to real national significance and if the major powers
took a real interest in him and tried to discredit him.
If Paul remains inconsequential, he’ll remain fairly well below the radar, with lazy MSM reporters parroting the “Paul is doing well in online polls” and “massive grassroots support” claims of highly questionable veracity. If he actually gains momentum and threatens either of the two parties, he’ll be buried alive.
In a political climate where even David Duke has to pretend that he’s not a racist, events like Black’s check and White’s claims will savage the poor loon in any national discussion of his candidacy.
Paul may run with a big ol’ L next to his name when he loses his bid for a Republican nomination, or a big ol’ I for that matter. He’ll lose there too. Hopefully Paul has the sense to sit down after being slapped down, and he hasn’t really been making much noise about carrying on the “Ron Paul Revolution” (and he didn’t run as a lib in the first place, anyways)
I don’t see Paul having any real impact on American politics after he vanishes back into obscurity and his name recognition vanishes.
Crap. Cut and paste the wrong link. Here is the link from CNN entitled “Paul to keep donation from white supremacist.”
And while I’m at it, Paul has also appeared on Alex Jones’ radio crapfest several times. A major liability come election time if Paul is worth noticing.
The only way this line of reasoning is relevant is if we know what percent of voters for all candidates make contributions to campaigns. Casual googling didn’t turn up anything, but your arbitrary 1/20 or 1/100 ratios are meaningless yardsticks.
What reasoning are you talking about?
I said that the cash raised was an objective measures and that trying to guess at his support based on his campaign contributions was tricky. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t say that it was a meaningful yardstick. I did say that it was “tricky” and things had to be “assumed” to guess at the implications of the fundraising. That was my point. Nowhere did I claim it was a meaningful yardstick.
Nor, as you suggest, would knowing what percent of “voters for all candidates” contribute money tells us anything specific about whether or not Paul’s support holds to the average. Even individual candidates’ vary greatly in looking at their supporters vs their contributors. The overall average certainly wouldn’t be a “meaningful yardstick”.
In any case, my entire point was that there are few objective measures of Paul’s support and that it is hard to estimate his total hardcore support based on the objective facts of his campaign contributions. Nothing ‘irrelevant’ about it.
Wow. Somebody got coal in their stocking.
As long as this thread is on the front page, it’s interesting to note that the criticism is not just coming from those right of center, but from folks like Kos as well. Despite the denials (some of which are of dubious credibility), there’s more than enough red meat in the water to provoke a frenzy should Paul actually, ya know, matter.
Any RP run, under any party, would have to contend with attacks from both sides of the political spectrum. And Paul simply doesn’t have the money or the political acumen to wage an effective battle on those grounds.
As I’ve said about a hundred times in these third party speculation threads, if the putative third party candidate doesn’t have enough support to win the nomination of one of the major parties, how in the world can they expect to get enough support to win the general election?
This doesn’t include candidates who run in order to increase visibility for their issues, like Nader, Nader wasn’t expecting to win.
But coming in at third place is the best a third party candidate can hope for, and third place isn’t even as good as second place, and it sure as hell isn’t first place. And first place is the only thing that counts. If there were enough small-l libertarians to give Paul a slim chance of winning the general election on the Libertarian ticket, why can’t all those libertarians guarantee him the Republican nomination?
Of course, if his goal isn’t to win the election, and he doesn’t care which of the major party candidates win, and he doesn’t care about his future in the major party, then all bets are off. But honestly, what would getting even 5% of the vote accomplish, besides another footnote to history? Ross Perot got more than that, and he accomplished absolutely nothing, he didn’t create a lasting party and he didn’t advance any of his core issues. Ron Paul wouldn’t even accomplish as much as Ross Perot.
IIRC, Perot actually hurt some of his core issues. Perot was strongly against NAFTA, but after his debate on Larry King Live against Gore, he was trounced and his positions began to look a good bit laughable.
Partially as a result of that debacle, support for NAFTA went from a bill that the House looked like it might kill and an issue that was generally viewed less than favorably by a majority of Americans, to national law with majority support from the American populace.
If Paul actually achieved reasonable name recognition, and charges of racism could be made to stick in the public mind (regardless of their truth value), Paul might actually end up doing more harm than good to some of his more vocally held positions.
Ooh! I didn’t realize this until I perused the Wiki article on the U.S. Presidential election 2008. Apparently, the LP actually invited Paul to be its candidate back in December.
Presumably the invitation remains open.
I don’t understand this argument about his electability. I think RP is a nutcase, but not enough of one to actually think he can get the Republican nomination. If he is doing it to either spread his message or bask in attention from the media, he might run as a Lib. I’m sure his actual chances of winning wil have nothing to do with his decision.
I’d donate money to him. Never vote for him but money yes.
He won’t run for the LP. It’s way too much hassle. The hoops that third parties have to jump through just for ballot access alone are expensive, time consuming, and famously unrewarding.
Yeah, but the LP are old hands at the process.
Do you think Paul will stay in the race until the primaries are over?
I think he’ll stay in as long as he can afford it. He’s really not dumb. He knows he won’t win. His purpose is to put out the message that the Republican Party has lost its way, and has changed into something that would be unrecognizable to the previous generation. He’ll do that for as long as he can.