Friday, January 4, 2008

Ron Paul's showing in Iowa decent, but there is a silver lining

Though Ron Paul's fifth place showing in Iowa was lower than some had hoped, there is actually some good news to be gleaned from his vote total for his future performance in New Hampshire and elsewhere.

Average polling data indicated that Ron Paul had risen to 7.6% in polls by January 2nd. With his 10% showing at the Iowa caucus, he showed that he could bring out at least a third more voters to the booths than polls indicated. Common sense says that polling will never be perfect, but on the other hand it may be true that polling really does exclude Ron Paul support because they're young, never voted before, or do not use land lines. If this pattern holds, Ron Paul will always do better than what's reported by traditional polling methods.

There are also certain elements of the Iowa population where Ron Paul trounced the competition. According to MSNBC's exit polling, Dr. Paul dominated among independents who voted Republican with 29% of the vote, and with voters who described themselves as angry with the Bush administration he scored a whopping 54%. Since New Hampshire expresses both of those demographics strongly, and plays host to the libertarian-oriented Free State Project, he stands a good chance of placing highly and even winning that state.

Another interesting fact is that Ron Paul was one of only three candidates to place first in an Iowa County (the other two being Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney of course). This happened to be Jefferson County, Iowa. If anybody knows what makes Jefferson County special, please let me know. This is definitely good news that the campaign is able to target locations where he's popular and draw out the voters. You can view how Republicans placed by county, here.

Update: here are some more predictions on Ron Paul and other Republican candidates, as well as the number of delegates assigned per candidate.

7 comments:

Akubi said...

Although I was bitching about his thoughts on evolution and such recently, Ron Paul was the only Republican candidate who made any sense whatsoever (hence my concern with his comments on evolution) and I could listen to for more than 5 minutes without wanting to vomit. While it already seemed that a significant portion of the blogs I read support Ron Paul, the straw that broke this camel’s back was Damion Lupo’s Ron Paul email spam to former Casey commenters. Nonetheless, I’m glad he did as well as he did in Iowa, but would like to suggest Sherman McCoy’s backup plan.

Count Nadeau said...

Hi Akubi! It's great having you around, I haven't seen you in a while. As far as the evolution comments are concerned, they don't matter anyway, since he thought they were unimportant (his mentioning of that was edited out of a lot of videos), and they don't matter anyway since he wants nothing to do with how your schools are run or what you teach you kids. He could believe in the flying spaghetti monster molding hew-mons out of meatballs for all I care, and it wouldn't matter at all due to his overriding views on education (do you want Clinton mandating a "Video Games Are Evil" course in public schools? me neither.).

By the way, I'm totally with you on that backup plan. No better way to say fuck you to The Man (well, in Clinton's case The Wo-Man) than to vote the son of a Kenyan goat herder into the Oval Office.

By the way, you could have added a NSFW tag to that link... my wife could have seen that one!

BTW, I didn't get the Damion Lupo spam. BUT just to show you how small the world is, the guy who bought out iamfacingforeclosure, runs the mortgage lender implodo-meter, AND he's a HUGE Ron Paul supporter. Cheers!

Akubi said...

Yes, I do remember Ron Paul stating it was unimportant in the first place, but they had such a funny heyday with that comment on some of the cephalopod friendly science blogs in my feeders, I had difficulty taking him seriously afterwards.
Oh, I guess I’ve spent too much time in Zillow Book zone to know what NSFW means – I thought that was a pretty clean Money Shot post (compared to the rest of them but forgot his ads).

Regarding implodo-meter and such, it seems like a ton of bubble bloggers are Ron Paul enthusiasts.

Whatever happens I can't wait to kick what is left of the Bush Admin out the door and never see them again (despite and because of the fact that we'll be paying for them for decades).

Cheers

Count Nadeau said...

I hear ya on the Bush Administration. You'll think less of me after hearing this, but I voted for him in 2000. Yep, seriously. I actually believed him when he said "no nation building", and "a humble foreign policy". It would be funny if it weren't so sad. I knew it was "GAME OVER MAN!" in the Iraq War when the Baghdad antiquities museum was completely robbed. Whatever good karma we gained by toppling Saddam was gone.

Despite Al Gore's hypocrisy (a jet-setter living in a giant carbon-munching mansion being holier-than-thou about the environment), saying he probably would have been a more effective president is stating the obvious.

(Addendum: I threw my vote away for Badnarik in 2004 since my vote doesn't count in Illinois anyway)

Count Nadeau said...

I forgot to add, that on a personal level Ron Paul is more green in his left pinky than Al Gore. He grows organic tomatoes and rides a bike whenever he can. In fact, I'd go so far to say that G. W. Bush lives greener than Al Gore does.

I shouldn't drink wine and blog before going to bed.

Akubi said...

Yeah, I know Al Gore doesn't walk the walk, but at least he seems to have an IQ higher than my dogs who I’m certain are more intelligent than W.
I was very concerned about the situation in Afghanistan before 9/11 so I didn't have a problem with that invasion, but thought Iraq was a red herring that would be another Vietnam that would deflect us from stabilizing Afganistan and it appears that was exactly the case.
Just suffered through the Republican debate where the only Republican who didn’t make me want to bang my head against the nearest wall was Ron Paul and my mom called afterwards – while she, my step-dad and I all have different Dem favorites we do agree that Paul is the best Republican.

Count Nadeau said...

Yeah, the republican debates were pretty nasty. Romney really annoyed me with his camera-hogging antics. I almost threw a shoe at the teevee when he said "hey, leave them drug companies alone!". Can we say WTF? Did you know that drug companies get a good chunk of their research money from taxpayers and universities, then have the audacity to take patents on them, therefore milking American consumers pay more than any others on the entire planet? It makes me ill. (Not that I'm advocating for windfall taxes, I just think we should take away their punch bowl)

But yeah, you're right on Al Gore having enough IQ to get a grasp on the running the executive department without having to delegate everything to his corrupt frat buddies. The only thing that worries me is that he'd establish a regressive carbon tax that would probably hurt poor people--guess who would be able to afford zero-carbon housing? Also, carbon credits would horrifically distort the market--while Western countries can afford expensive alternative energy, it would force third world countries to stay in the stone age, as they would not be able to use their abundant fossil fuels to jumpstart their economies to catch up with us. I would prefer for people to educate themselves about the environment and reduce emissions voluntarily; eventually the free market will provide competitive technologies as fossil fuels become increasingly expensive.