Nice job trying to explain away Ron Paul's win at this conference. But, given that Romney and Hunter both attended this conference, and Ron Paul did not but got more votes than the two of them combined, I can draw only two conclusions:
(1) Support for Ron Paul is a lot deeper than most are willing to admit; or
(2) Romney and Hunter's campaigns made a serious error by agreeing to speak at an event that was pre-rigged for Ron Paul. Well, on second thought - this is a huge boost for Hunter. But Romney's stock definitely drops on this news. He avoided Farah and Schlafly at the value voters debate, he avoided Tavis Smiley at the black-oriented debate, but he just stepped on a land mine this time.
I think SierraScrapper is pretty familiar with the area she lives in.
Jason Wright and Stephen Fountain run PoliticalDerby.com, where this story is published from. And Jason Wright verified the straw poll results.
So, you can surf over to PoliticalDerby.com to get a feel for the site, story, conference and get questions answered.
“(1) Support for Ron Paul is a lot deeper than most are willing to admit; or...”
Not really. Let’s do some math. According to Calpernia, Duncan Hunter missed out on 2nd place by two votes. The difference between 2nd and 3rd place was 0.0151, meaning that two votes equals 0.0150 votes. If that’s true, then only about 132 people participated in this poll. If that’s true, then Ron Paul got about 43 votes. Forty-three votes does not translate to wide support.
I grant you that the RP campaign is doing a fine job in making sure that RP supporters show up at straw polls. One can only wonder just how many ‘straw polls’ an individual RP supporter has voted in. Nothing wrong with that, but having a small, dedicated, and committed group of supporters does not equate to having ‘deep support’.
He has no prayer, no hope, no possibility of ever winning the primaries anywhere. So how can you be so optimistic? He’s a libertarian, not a conservative. One poll does not prove anything.
So, Romney was a conservative this week?
Ron Paul has a lot of support in these polls.
It just isn’t from conservatives or Republicans.
Perhaps RonPaul and AlGore could team up and run as a third party.