Reporter inquiry: How do you win so many straw polls?

I know I'm late, but I sent an email anyways

(I am aware that this email is being sent past you story deadline, but I think what I have to say may offer some insight for future write ups)

Many non-Ron Paul supporters are often very confused at how the Doctor can have such passionate and dedicated support, especially among so many young people when there are younger, edgier candidates and politicians. First off, all Ron Paul supporters don't agree with Ron Paul on everything he believes, several liberals and green party supporters find themselves supporting Paul along with Constitutionalists, Libertarians, Christian Conservatives, Market Anarchist and even a handful Anarcho-Socialist. How can one man bring such fundamentally at odd ideologies around one banner with policy positions that can easily turn any of these groups off?

The difference is Ron Pauls authenticity and message. His message is not one of any particular policy solving all our problems, but one that focuses on the things that bring people together especially idealistic youth who hold on dearly to the belief that perilous incentives of politics can be overcome. What ideas are these? Accountability, Non-Violence, self empowerment which all are ideas that are kindle to fire that is the young mind is searching for not only define themselves but bring some change to the world.

Also in Pauls favor, and now arguably his Son is his clarity of his goals. While Ron Paul supports many controversial actions, he's very clear on what his goals are and is pretty good to sticking to those goals so even if your a Green Party Member, or Christian Conservative who may disagree on other positions you go away with a clear view of what is on the agenda and what your gonna get.

This Clarity, This Message, This Hope that Idealism doesn't have to Die with youth is what drives the fervor of the Paul crowd, it something that should be admired, his ability to reawaken the belief in ideals that many of us give way to cynicism and pragmatism.

Sincerely,
Alex Merced
http://www.alexmerced.com
Click to expand...
 
Cool thread, a pleasure to read. Thanks to Kasie for taking the effort to enter a dialogue with us, instead of just making up whatever-the-hell-you-feel-like about Dr. Paul and his supporters like most journalists do.

I think what matters most is that we care! Second, for me, is that Ron is not one of the "team" in DC. I tried to find the picture from the 2008 debate (CNN maybe?) where all candidates on both parties came out onto the stage together. All the msm darlings like Romney, Obama, Hillary, etc were real buddy-buddy up on stage, while Ron Paul was left off to the side like the kid nobody wanted to play with at school. THAT IS WHY I LIKE THE MAN! I love his message of small government, civil liberties (who doesn't like those?), sound money (not getting ripped off by bankers), and constitutional principles.

Most people just want to be on the winning team in politics. We want to be right and we're damn smart enough to make a difference.

eta: Our enthusiasm sometimes is overly zealous, as you're seeing at CPAC. There are some supporters that simply can't control themselves at appropriate times and live to piss as many people off as possible. Oh yeah, and we know history so Paul's rhetoric makes a lot of sense historically.
 
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devil21 said:
Cool thread, a pleasure to read. Thanks to Kasie for taking the effort to enter a dialogue with us, instead of just making up whatever-the-hell-you-feel-like about Dr. Paul and his supporters like most journalists do.

I think what matters most is that we care! Second, for me, is that Ron is not one of the "team" in DC. I tried to find the picture from the 2008 debate (CNN maybe?) where all candidates on both parties came out onto the stage together. All the msm darlings like Romney, Obama, Hillary, etc were real buddy-buddy up on stage, while Ron Paul was left off to the side like the kid nobody wanted to play with at school. THAT IS WHY I LIKE THE MAN! I love his message of small government, civil liberties (who doesn't like those?), sound money (not getting ripped off by bankers), and constitutional principles.

Most people just want to be on the winning team in politics. We want to be right and we're damn smart enough to make a difference.
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i don't think this is the same debate you are talking about, but the theme continues:
2116453931_4647dc2b50.jpg
 
The more people marginalize Ron Paul and tell us that he cannot win, the more passionately devoted we become in our support of him. The more biased the media is against him, the more fuel is poured on the fire. If I wasn't so consistently provoked by all the unfair coverage and criticism of him, I wouldn't be nearly as dedicated to political activism.
 
I wish the reporter would come back and give some feedback on what's been mentioned and how she knew about this forum. We can guess this forum is monitored heavily by some.
 
Captain Shays said:
As to the question about age, I am going to be 52 in July. My wife is two years younger then me. Both us of and two of our children ages 27 and 29 are Ron Paul supporters.

I was a RP supporter since reading an article he wrote back in `1999 which knocked me over. I didn't even know what he looked like back then but watched for anything he wrote or said and the more he wrote and said the bigger fan I became. Now I consider the man my hero.
My wife wasn't very active and she heard me talking about him a lot. Her first real exposure to him was the first Republican debate in 2007 which by the voters numbers he won handedly. It was an MSNBC hosted debate and we went to their website and cast our votes. It said that Ron Paul had 63% of the vote. It stayed like that until the end. I don't think he still had 63% but he won that poll by a lot. There was also a Yahoo poll which we voted for him in and a Politico poll as well. He won them all according to the number of votes. But the next day when we went to look at the final results, the MSNBC page had a big picture of Mitt Romney as their headliner and declared him the winner even though they still had the numbers posted which Ron Paul got the most. Yahoo's poll also had his winning numbers up but declared Romney the winner as well. On Yahoo's page they had a head shot picture of all the Democrat candidates with their names under it on one side and all the Republican candidates with a head shot and their name under it. But where Ron Paul's picture and name were previously, they had a darkened out head and "undecided" where his name was. They had the number of votes he got for sure but instead of going to his name it went to undecided.
The same thing went on with every subsequent debate and poll where we were accused of voting 100 times each which deeply offended both me and my wife.

So in the second poll they had both a internet poll and a phone text poll. So we both voted for Ron Paul of course but then as an experiment she tried to vote for Ron Paul again and I tried to vote for Duncan Hunter just to see what would happen. Neither the internet poll or the phone text poll would allow us. The winning numbers were real and we knew it.
That didn't stop all the political pundits from accusing us of voting 100 times each though.
Then we had a money bomb where we raised $4.3 million in one day. That got Ron Paul a lot of attention and caused a lot of them to admit that maybe there is some real support for Ron Paul out there. Glenn Beck accused us of being terrorists because we had our money bomb on Guy Faulks Day.

But just one month later we had a money bomb on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party Rebellion and shattered John Kerry's single day fund raising record with $6.5 million. Ironically not one media outlet in the country cared to mention it. My wife and me were proud of our personal effort and the effort of Ron Paul's supporters. It was a personal victory against the mainstream media who were trying to either ignore us/Ron Paul or marginalize him and us.
The response was that the Republicans hosted another debate just a few days later in New Hampshire and excluded only Ron Paul based on a lack of support even though the average contribution to the largest single day find raising effort in US history was $50.

So whenever I see a poll, I go out of my way to vote in it and I think all of us do because it's out only chance to show the world that we're here, we're informed better than the supporters of other candidates, and we're active. Most of all, we're not going away. I for one would willingly be the last standing Ron Paul supporter if it came down to it.

One thing you might want to mention in your article is that with me anyway, this isn't specifically about Ron Paul. It's about the principles. It's about the Constitution. Its about limited government, a non interventionist foreign policy, honesty, integrity, and courage. It just so happens that Ron Paul is the ONLY one I see who embodies all of those things.
Click to expand...

Great Post! +rep
 
georgiaboy said:
This movement has always, always been about ideas, not people. Ron Paul himself has said that. His biggest goal has always to get people to understand and agree with his ideas, regardless of who is saying them. His ideas are the ones America was founded on - a small central government overtly constrained by the constitution to only do a few things, protecting the sovereignty and rights of the individual as the centerpiece of a prosperous republic. It's a message of peace, freedom, and prosperity.

The thing about Ron is that he's one of a tiny handful of legislators who has actually voted, mostly alone, on bill after bill, year after year -- for decades -- in support of these most high of ideals. One can only imagine how prosperous our country's citizenry would be right now if all others had done the same.

How to win a straw poll is pretty simple - show up in numbers and vote. How to get and keep those numbers, and keep them rising, without paying off anyone to do so, without 'padding' the ballot boxes or 'spamming' online polls? Be a man of real principle, backed up by decades of living by and acting on those principles, and simply ask those who support you to begin doing likewise. And continue being the humble gracious man of your word that you are.

More simply put, we're returning the favor to a man who has tirelessly and steadfastly stood in the gap for us, even when we didn't know it or appreciate it.
Click to expand...

Great Post!

+rep
 
specsaregood said:
Or conveniently missing from this one:
iowastrawpollresults.jpg
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Context for the lazy:
August 11, 2007
Iowa Straw Poll Results
Mitt Romney: 4,516 / 31.5%
Mike Huckabee: 2,587 / 18.1%
Sam Brownback: 2,192 / 15.3%
Tom Tancredo: 1,961 / 13.7%
Ron Paul: 1,305 / 9.1%
Tommy Thompson: 1,039 / 7.3%
Fred Thompson: 203 / 1.4%
Rudy Giuliani: 183 / 1.3%
Duncan Hunter: 174 / 1.2%
John McCain: 101 / 1.0%
John Cox: 41 / .1%

14,302 Total Votes

26,000 Total Tickets Sold
Click to expand...
http://ronpaul2008.typepad.com/ron_paul_2008/2007/08/iowa-straw-poll.html
 
Bryan said:
Politico is a bit diverse, and I see it as illogical to group all the writers in together. Find something that Kasie wrote that is problematic then the case is stronger.
Click to expand...

Cops are also quite diverse, but it's not in my interest to deal with any one of them in any manner other than the one that assumes that they are perfectly willing to torture me and/or end my life on the flimsiest pretext.
She represents an outfit which is similarly perpetuating an anti-liberty situation. It could be that she's different, and I certainly hope so. But like Specs, I'm not expecting anything.

This brings up a bigger question though. What will happen when Dr. Paul can't be ignored anymore?

I remember a case - this already happened - where someone had Dr. Paul on TV, and the "journalist" had gone to ronpaulforpresident2008.com and assumed that he was directly responsible for everything on that site. So Ron had to answer for something that Lew Rockwell had written.

Like it or not, that is going to be every one of us at some point real soon. I think we stand a real chance of watching him go down in flames as he spends his entire campaign explaining that he's not responsible for what other people do.
They already proved that they're out to get him. It's not paranoia.
They already did this same thing with the letters. They'll do it again.
So forgive us if Specs and I don't trust this woman.


Valli6 said:
Other over-used words:

cult-like (following)
gadfly
quirky
fringe
Click to expand...

Oh, the full meaning of the word is lost on most people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_quixote
"Character-naming in Don Quixote makes ample figural use of contradiction, inversion, and irony... the word quixote itself, possibly a pun on quijada (jaw) but certainly cuixot (Catalan: thighs), a reference to a horse's rump... The Spanish suffix -ote denotes the augmentative—for example, grande means large, but grandote means extra large. Following this example, Quixote would suggest 'The Great Quijano' "
 
Kasie, if you've continued to read all these posts, the bottom line is that every step of the way, Fox News and the RNC tried to quash the "tea parties" before they ever got rolling.

And then when they could no longer ignore it, they wanted to control it. Now they're repackaging the same, tired, disastrous policies and calling them "tea party" policies.

The somewhat libertarian-leaning Fox Business Network is their way of hedging their bets if by some miracle, we're able to break through again and knock some sense into more people - then they can say they were with the libertarians all along.

They still control the narrative to a large extent in the minds of the public. And their continued propping up of the left-right paradigm is what has led to such a backlash against the tea parties on the left. We were making inroads with liberals before Fox got involved. Now they recoil at anything "tea party".

I think most of us here would describe ourselves as part of the "liberty movement".
 
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Gaius1981 said:
The more people marginalize Ron Paul and tell us that he cannot win, the more passionately devoted we become in our support of him. The more biased the media is against him, the more fuel is poured on the fire. If I wasn't so consistently provoked by all the unfair coverage and criticism of him, I wouldn't be nearly as dedicated to political activism.
Click to expand...

this is the great equalizer; the dinosauar media can only win for so long. they are losing grip, the REVOLUTION is gaining ground! RP 2-0-1-2!!!!
 
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