From NationalLedger.com
DC Journal
What Can Ron Paul Supporters Expect Now?
By Michael Amsterdam
Nov 15, 2007
It has been interesting to watch the support of Ron Paul explode on the World Wide Web. The quiet US Congressman that was long ago dubbed "Dr. No" for the physician's "no votes" in Congress is playing a bit of the Ralph Nader role in this presidential election season as many of the political misfits have latched on to his campaign and are pushing hard for a Paul nomination for the Republican Party.
What Can Ron Paul Supporters Expect?
His supporters are a tenacious and for the most part a very annoying bunch. They have been banned from blogs and chat boards across the Internet. There is little debate with the group and their strategy appears to be to browbeat their competition into backing Dr. No or face their wrath.
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Unfortunately for the supporters, they are a finite number and it is quite small in the overall scheme of a presidential election. So what can Ron Paul supporters expect? Simply put, he can't win. There is no chance that he can capture the GOP nomination, but as a fun exercise, let's figure out how many states he would win in a general election if he ran as the Republican nominee against any of the Democratic frontrunners.
That number is likely zero and certainly less than five. In a wild long shot scenario, he could grab a couple of the Mountain West states, (Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming perhaps) but he would certainly lose nearly every other state and I'm quite certain that would include his own home state of Texas if he ran in a general election against a democrat as a Republican. It would be an Electoral College landslide.
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But it won't happen. However, Paul could try to play spoiler, but a new poll shows that even that would have very marginal impact. In a recent Rasmussen Report poll that included Dr. Paul on the ballot running as a Libertarian he grabs a paltry 8% of those polled and shockingly with all of the buzz and noise around his campaign that is only 4% higher than Al Gore's nemesis Ralph Nader. But it appears that he take away votes from Republicans, in fact he may be anti-war enough to help the GOP if he runs as an independent or as the nominee for the Libertarian Party.
At this point I believe that the only thing that Paul supporters can hope for is to shift the debate towards the issues. You can forget any quick exit from Iraq as even the top three Democrats (Clinton, Obama and Edwards) realize that a US Military presence is required there for a very long time.
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But it would be a refreshing change if Paul could move the debate and use his "sane" supporters and their influence to force Republicans to move back towards being the party of smaller government and less spending. Can they pull it off and can Paul be the messenger of change? One can hope.
--Political Analysis by Michael Amsterdam.
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