4 p.m.: If Ron Paul can raise more than $6 million in one day, how come he's not higher in the polls?
The polls are lagging what is really happening because the polls are hopelessly static.
Facts:
Ron Paul has about 120k individual contributors this quarter. (ronpaul2008.com)
The United States has a Population: 301,139,947 (July 2007 est.) (cia.gov)
According to this tracker, Doctor Paul Polls at an average of 4.5% nationally.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ep...s/republican_presidential_nomination-192.html
So we are led to believe that 4.5% of Americans support Ron Paul. Thats 13,551,298 people.
If Ron Paul had 4.5% nationally he would have raised over 1 billion dollars on the teaparty.
So this can only mean 1 of 2 things.
Less than 1% of the people who support Ron Paul actually donated to his campaign, or
the polls are an inaccurate way to gauge true support.
Lets step back for a minute and dispel and clarify some assumptions. First, as has been reported by many news outlets, Ron Paul has a very dedicated following of people. How dedicated we don't know.
Next, we know that there is no way all 300 million American's will vote in the primary. Sad but true. So, what will the turn out look like? Well, its happening in the dead of winter. Lets look at the last time a Republican primary took place when there was no Republican incumbent. According to the US Census, the population in the USA in 2000 was 281,421,906.
Next, according to thegreenpapers.com 19,519,539 Republicans voted in the 2000 primaries. Lets assume there will be a similar turnout year where about 7% of the population (.0693) will turnout to vote republican. 7% with todays population is 20,887,190. So if Doctor Paul is polling 4.5% of likely voters nationally that would mean his chunk of that is 939,923 voters. That means that about 13% of Pauls supporters have donated this quarter and 7% donated on largest fundraising day in political fundraising history.
Finally, lets consider the 25,000 new donors the Paul Campaigned picked up as of yesterday. If Doctor Pauls support/donor ratio this month is 10:1, that means that the campaign likely picked up and additional 250K new voters in 1 day.
There is no way for static polling that is currently done to reflect this increase in popularity. In fact, I think the polls may be lagging by as much as 2 months when attempting to indicate support. What is even more remarkable is that even though Paul's support is lagging in the poll thus, lackluster MSM coverage, Paul's support base continues to double and triple at an unprecedented rate.
The Polls are worthless when it comes to trying to figure out what 300 MILLION people will do and as long as Paul keeps picking up people who have never voted republican, don't own landline phones, crossing party lines, coming out of the independant woodwork, and not involved in politics in general, then you can expect the polls to be completely useless come primary and caucus time.
This is election cycle and specifically Ron Paul's Presidential campaign is really turning out to be a battle between Old Media and the internet. This is a battle of We the People vs Status Quo. We want change and we want your old school polls which determine who gets on OUR TV sets to take a hike. Money talks, garbage polls walk.