2012: Who are the frontrunners? - Fantastic research article with Paul on top!

[FromFreedomToFascism]

This has been spreading today since it was shared on Digg. It's a great article where they research what makes a frontrunner and calculate each candidates position in the race via poll results, fundraising, etc. And all of it is based off of official info!

Guess who comes out on top! This is no joke. An excellent article with no bias whatsoever. Send this to people you know and the mainstream media!

http://commonsense2012.hubpages.com/hub/Real-Journalism

or Digg at

http://digg.com/news/politics/2012_who_are_the_frontrunners

[FA.Hayek]

very interesting

[miketoles]

The graphs are broken.

[FromFreedomToFascism]

The data charts? I can still see them fine.

[misconstrued]

Interesting article.

[malkusm]

Unfortunately, this is clearly biased in favor of Paul. Not that his four criteria are wrong, but including the CPAC straw poll as a legitimate poll is not indicative of how the population would vote. Google searches might demonstrate name recognition on the Internet, but is not a scientific indicator of name recognition. Finally, the author demonstrates clear bias with making "adherence to the traditional Republican platform" completely arbitrary, picking both the issues that will be included as well as the side which each candidate is on. The last true non-interventionist Presidential candidate that the GOP fielded was probably Richard Nixon or Barry Goldwater, although neither was as staunch a non-interventionist as Paul is. That legacy runs a lot farther back, and unfortunately, history from 70+ years ago does not influence voters today in choosing a candidate.

It's a good idea, and no doubt, if it were done in a truly unbiased manner, Ron Paul would still come out among the top 4.

[FromFreedomToFascism]

I though these same things, malkusm. But I wasn't sure if it favored Paul just because I wanted it to, haha. You have to remember though, non-interventionism is still actually considered a republican staple (as far as in documents). Bush actually ran on that platform. I think that was a bit-biased though. Who other than Paul supporters refer to "traditional republican platform"? ***Update: I just re-read the article, and me and you totally missed this. It actually acknowledges the fact that the "traditional" may be seen as biased since the "platform is changing". So in the third and final tally, those results are subtracted from the total to be fair. I'd say they did a good job of at least reducing bias as much as they could.

But, it is about what "should" make the frontrunners. In that regard, I think it did a good job using large official polls, and you're entirely right about the Google thing. But, aside from that, where else can an independent journalist find as large of a sample than Google? I don't think it's supposed to be scientific, as the only way you can do that is : The General Election, hahaha.

[Narmical]

I think the article's purpose was more to demonstrate that the MSM choice of front runners is based totaly on nothing. You can agree or disagree with the article's evaluation, and that's point. You can't disagree with "this guy is the front runner cause i said so" with anything else than a "Nuh-uh".

The article's selection of font runners are based on facts and logical reasoning from those facts. MSM's is based on nothing.