Uhh, clearly you havent been WATCHING the polls, or the internet at all. All political blogs are lit up with Paul support. All Polls are in favor of Paul. You’re wrong here. Although Guliani, McCain, and Romney do HAVE avid supporters—they are NO where near as numerous or effective as Ron Paul’s (at least online, since that was the topic).

You write:

“Tom K: Actually, no, the larger candidates DON’T organize their people to vote in online opt-in polls. ... Slamming opt-in polls isn’t a sign of strength- it’s a sign of desperation.”

I see you haven’t attended the first day of that remedial reading course I offered a small subsidy toward yet. I wish you’d hurry up and get after that.

Where and when did I say that any candidates “organized their people” to vote in online polls? I said no such thing, and I was fairly obviously referring (“posse of fans”) to unorganized, at least by the campaigns, pollspamming.

A candidate who attracts avid supporters is going to have polls “spammed” on his behalf by some of those supporters. If Romney, McCain and Giuliani don’t have people so dedicated to them that they’ll engage in that kind of basic, easy activity, why would we expect that they have people so dedicated to them that they’ll be willing to take four years off from the private sector to live in a cubicle in DC as part of their administrations?

The answer, of course, is that there are Romney, McCain and Giuliani “poll-spamming” clubs, “digg” clubs, etc. all over the place. They DO have dedicated supporters at the grass roots and on the Internet. And I seriously doubt that the informal similar operations on behalf of Ron Paul are bigger or more effective than those of the Big Dogs. QED, “Ron Paul’s people are spamming the polls” is not the answer to the question “why is Ron Paul doing so well in online polls?”

What are the answers to that question? Here are a few likely ones:

1) The kind of people who tend to support “alternative candidates” like Ron Paul are Internet users in higher proportion than the people who support more “mainstream” candidates. “Early adopter” and “tends to think outside the mainstream” go together like peas and carrots. That phenomenon is becoming less pronounced as more Americans take up regular use of the Internet (i.e. as it becomes increasingly less “new”), but it hasn’t washed out completely by any means. Libertarians in particular are still at a proportional advantage on the Net, but not off of it.

2) The kind of people who support “alternative candidates” tend to spend more time thinking about politics and doing stuff about politics—including on the Internet, and including chasing, and voting in, online polls. We wouldn’t support “alternative candidates” if we didn’t spend more time thinking and doing about politics, because we would never have known about those alternative candidates if the only attention we paid to politics was 10 minutes a day on CNN Headline News or at the New York Times web site.

3) The kind of people who support “alternative candidates” tend to hang out in higher concentrations/fewer sites online, which makes them easier to reach by people asking them to, for example, go vote for Ron Paul in an online poll. So, Ron’s fans don’t have to be as organized as Rudy’s to have a bigger impact.

Polls like this ARE useful. They measure the PASSION candidates generate among their admirers. If you assume that the polltakers could have done nothing to prevent “spamming” (an assertion I have seen refuted in several places online), it STILL doesn’t address the question of what is preventing any OTHER candidates’ base of support from doing the SAME thing !

Obviously, regardless of actual numbers, Ron Paul supporters are passionate about their choice, while the other candidates’ supporters are not. That passion is shown by the willingness to bother responding to polls such as these.

Yes, I saw Hack-ity trying to claim that Congress declared war. Even he would shut up and listen, he might learn something. Given how much he knows now, there is a lot of potential there.

I think Ron Paul supporters are voting in every poll they can while Rudy McRomney supporters are that concerned in voting in these polls. And I am wondering if Fox rigged the poll at the end to make sure Paul didn’t win.

Opt-in polls do not reflect the electorate- ever. Voting in them is a waste of time second only to claiming them as proof of overwhelming support- as the Paul campaign is claiming.

Slamming opt-in polls isn’t a sign of strength- it’s a sign of desperation.

Otherwise, it would have been better for them to ignore him. Actually, it would have been better for them to ignore him.

GE, Joe Lieberman did run and he won anyway.