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bobmurph
11-26-2007, 10:19 PM
The media pundits consistently compare the internet success that the 2008 RP campaign to the 2004 Dean campaigns internet success. They then will quip that Dean was unable to turn his internet success into votes.

It got me to thinking, how successful was Dean in 2003/20004 straw polls? Ron Paul has, of course, been wildly successful in straw polls across the nation. He has already converted his internet support into numerous straw poll victories...did Dean do the same or is this a legit response to the Dean comparison/critcism.

paulitics
11-26-2007, 10:20 PM
good question. With 100,000 meetup members, he should have dominated every one of them.

Qiu
11-26-2007, 10:28 PM
Democrats don't have straw polls

kylejack
11-26-2007, 10:29 PM
Democrats don't have straw polls

This. They have very very few, and what few they have hold no significance.

bobmurph
11-26-2007, 10:33 PM
Well...then I would consider the fact that RP has been successful in straw polls to be a valid point that he is converting his internet support to real voting success in a way that Dean has not.

kylejack
11-26-2007, 10:36 PM
Well...then I would consider the fact that RP has been successful in straw polls to be a valid point that he is converting his internet support to real voting success in a way that Dean has not.

On the other hand, nobody really cares about straw polls besides Ames, so most don't care about going to them and voting for their candidate.

akovacs
11-26-2007, 10:42 PM
In the broader sense, I have been wondering this myself.

Dean raised a lot of money, but could not translate that. Why? What was the thing that killed him early on? What did Kerry have that caused him to surge? I wish I could say I paid close attention, but I didn't :P

kylejack
11-26-2007, 10:56 PM
In the broader sense, I have been wondering this myself.

Dean raised a lot of money, but could not translate that. Why? What was the thing that killed him early on? What did Kerry have that caused him to surge? I wish I could say I paid close attention, but I didn't :P

YARRRRRRRRR

paulitics
11-26-2007, 10:56 PM
In the broader sense, I have been wondering this myself.

Dean raised a lot of money, but could not translate that. Why? What was the thing that killed him early on? What did Kerry have that caused him to surge? I wish I could say I paid close attention, but I didn't :P

its an enigma, how dead horse Kerry, the Bob Dole of democrats, popped up out of nowhere with no grassroots to completely annhilate Dean in Iowa. He was at 6% in the polls. Since Dean was expected to win, it was over for him in short order.

akovacs
11-26-2007, 11:00 PM
its an enigma, how dead horse Kerry, the Bob Dole of democrats, popped up out of nowhere with no grassroots to completely annhilate Dean in Iowa

No idea? See, this bothers me. This is something that I think we should know.

Maybe I should ask James Ostrowski, He predicted a Dean loss over a month before it happened. (http://jimostrowski.com/articles/diary.htm)

AlexMerced
11-26-2007, 11:04 PM
yeah, this has been racking my brain too... if Tancredo or Hunter win it out of nowhere I'll be pissed

akovacs
11-26-2007, 11:08 PM
I guess the bright side is that Ostrowski is predicting a Paul upset at the primaries, though he hasn't said whether he will win or not yet. The guy is historically pretty good on his political predictions (He predicted Hillary running over 3 years ago). It'd still be great to know why specifically.

damijin
11-26-2007, 11:18 PM
Haha, it was obvious Hillary was going to run in 2008 as soon as she filed for her first Senate run. I remember my 80 year old grandmother saying something in 2003 like "You know, this time around that awful Bush will win again... but Hillary will win next time, and she'll be the first woman president. Of course I won't be around by then..."

Now, my grandmother is still alive, so I can only hope that she's wrong about her particular prediction :P

About the Kerry thing... I've heard that negative politics between Dean and Gephardt was the driving factor in pushing Kerry/Edwards to the top.

What does this mean for us? Negative/Aggressive politics are not very well received by Iowa DEMOCRATS. This doesn't necessarily speak to Iowan GOP members, but just to be on the safe side, I would say that they are at least somewhat as adverse to this type of politics as their democrat neighbors.

On the plus side, Giuliani and Romney are slugging it out like infants, so hopefully they will be hindered by this. Boy would I love to see them place 3rd and 4th... or lower :D

However, our supporters often take aggressive to a whole new level. Be careful in Iowa. Don't force Dr. Paul down people's throats like a deluded zealot. We'll do alright there as long as we get the unfiltered message out in passive ways, and let the front runners self destruct.

ionlyknowy
11-26-2007, 11:22 PM
voting machines... must be the voting machines....;)

paulitics
11-26-2007, 11:28 PM
Haha, it was obvious Hillary was going to run in 2008 as soon as she filed for her first Senate run. I remember my 80 year old grandmother saying something in 2003 like "You know, this time around that awful Bush will win again... but Hillary will win next time, and she'll be the first woman president. Of course I won't be around by then..."

Now, my grandmother is still alive, so I can only hope that she's wrong about her particular prediction :P

About the Kerry thing... I've heard that negative politics between Dean and Gephardt was the driving factor in pushing Kerry/Edwards to the top.

What does this mean for us? Negative/Aggressive politics are not very well received by Iowa DEMOCRATS. This doesn't necessarily speak to Iowan GOP members, but just to be on the safe side, I would say that they are at least somewhat as adverse to this type of politics as their democrat neighbors.

On the plus side, Giuliani and Romney are slugging it out like infants, so hopefully they will be hindered by this. Boy would I love to see them place 3rd and 4th... or lower :D

However, our supporters often take aggressive to a whole new level. Be careful in Iowa. Don't force Dr. Paul down people's throats like a deluded zealot. We'll do alright there as long as we get the unfiltered message out in passive ways, and let the front runners self destruct.

I predicted Hillary in 2000, and Hillary vs Giuliani in 2002. Yes 6 years ago. Just follow who the media pimps, its very easy. Also look for who is most corrupt.

These guys are on my list for future possibilities:
Shwarzenegger, Rick Perry, Bloomberg. Al Gore, Rice. One of these guys will hold vice presidency in the next 8 years. And laugh now if you will, but keep your eye on Bono. Yes, the loveable music star. The media has been pimping him for years. He will be president of the world bank, or UN or something. Its fun to predict, even though I have no crystal ball.

alien
11-26-2007, 11:36 PM
No idea? See, this bothers me. This is something that I think we should know.

Maybe I should ask James Ostrowski, He predicted a Dean loss over a month before it happened. (http://jimostrowski.com/articles/diary.htm)

Hmmm, vote fraud?

damijin
11-26-2007, 11:41 PM
I predicted Hillary in 2000, and Hillary vs Giuliani in 2002. Yes 6 years ago. Just follow who the media pimps, its very easy. Also look for who is most corrupt.

These guys are on my list for future possibilities:
Shwarzenegger, Rick Perry, Bloomberg. Al Gore, Rice. One of these guys will hold vice presidency in the next 8 years. And laugh now if you will, but keep your eye on Bono. Yes, the loveable music star. The media has been pimping him for years. He will be president of the world bank, or UN or something. Its fun to predict, even though I have no crystal ball.

Giuliani has been smart to say he's not going for Iowa to begin with, because he would tank there if he tried. His best hope is that the rest of the states ignore Iowa and NH, and that he cleans up afterwards.

There's two ways that this will work:

The media will go "OMG GIULIANI PLACED 7th? WTF?? IS HIS CAMPAIGN OVER?" and voters will be like "Screw that honkey, my votes with Alan Keyes!"

or, and more likely-

The media will go "Well, Giuliani's strategy was to not invest time in these early states, so this is rather expected. I'm sure his showing on super tuesday will be strong since he is still the front runner and no amount of voting can change that."

alien
11-26-2007, 11:50 PM
I predicted Hillary in 2000, and Hillary vs Giuliani in 2002. Yes 6 years ago. Just follow who the media pimps, its very easy. Also look for who is most corrupt.

These guys are on my list for future possibilities:
Shwarzenegger, Rick Perry, Bloomberg. Al Gore, Rice. One of these guys will hold vice presidency in the next 8 years. And laugh now if you will, but keep your eye on Bono. Yes, the loveable music star. The media has been pimping him for years. He will be president of the world bank, or UN or something. Its fun to predict, even though I have no crystal ball.

Arnold is not a native born American. Of course that law may be out by that time.

DealzOnWheelz
11-26-2007, 11:59 PM
if we are a NORTH AMERICAN UNION and a new constitution is drafted then A'nold could be whatever the hell the leader would be called.

Dan D.
11-27-2007, 12:06 AM
You can trace Howard Dean's meteoric plummet to beginning the day after Al Gore endorsed him. And why not? He lost all credibility as an antiwar figure then. How could he accept an endorsement from the Vice President in an administration that had bombed Iraq, Serbia, and told the media there were WMD's there. Similarly, you can see Giuliani's implosion in the polls tracking not to Bernard Kerik, but to Pat Robertson.

ronpaulfan
11-27-2007, 12:10 AM
A Ron Paul Straw Poll Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8SgZELRjpo

Since that video was made, we won one more. We can now say "We've won more Straw Polls than all the other candidates combined" :D

Seriously. We can say that.

austin356
11-27-2007, 12:40 AM
straw polls are nothing more than a show of enthusiasm, not votes. People please get this straight.

I have organized 2 straw poll wins and all it shows is we have a small base that is organized and motivated.

saahmed
11-27-2007, 01:06 AM
voting machines... must be the voting machines....;)

The Iowa Democratic caucuses do not use voting machines. Basically people just stand in groups for the candidate they support and you can talk to people in other groups to try to get them to come to your group. Now maybe they could have reported wrong numbers to give Kerry the win, but I attended the caucus at my precinct, though I was unable to participate, and Kerry was the clear winner. I can't remember what the other candidate's groups looked like.

The Republicans though do use some sort of voting system but I dont think its electronic voting machines.

DRV45N05
11-27-2007, 01:19 AM
Being that I semi-supported Dean back in 2004 (Forgive me. I was a senior in High School, and while I was a libertarian Republican, I just simply hated George W. Bush. That said, Howard Dean is my second favorite Democrat of all time, and I have tons of respect for him), allow me to chime in here.

There were two problems that the Dean campaign had. Firstly, he peaked too soon. By November 03, he was the clear front-runner for the nomination; it looked like he had New Hampshire locked up, and he was pulling away in Iowa. At this point, the media was all over him, and they were waiting to pounce on any misteps, Howard Dean did provide. There are some striking ones that come to mind. The first was his comment about wanting to be the candidate for "Guys with Confederate Flags on their pickup trucks." Now, he meant this, of course, to mean that he wanted to appeal to lower-middle income southern white males, a group the Democratic Party had written off for a long time. However, as you can imagine would happen in a Democratic Primary, this got turned into "Howard Dean is a racist." Obviously, this is not a good way to win over power brokers who consider almost above all else one's electability and discipline. A few more things came about that really hurt him. There were the reports of his "secret energy group" in Vermont, analogous to the left-wing boogie man Cheney's "secret oil group." There were concerns about his tax platform, which would have flat out gotten rid of the Bush tax cuts and not kept ANY for the middle class. This was deemed to be too radical and unattractive for middle class voters to swallow in a general election (his position on trade was deemed amateurish, as well, and his platform was ultimately considered to be too far left on economic issues). Then there were media hissyfits about religion and the fact that his family wasn't featured a lot on the campaign trail (he would repeatedly fight back against these charges saying that he didn't want to use these things as "campaign props," which was honorable, but not a good election strategy).

With all of this turning on him, the second phase of his demise hit: DNC basically scrambled to find the "anti-Dean" in the field. Lieberman was the first to get really aggressive on Dean, attacking him on trade and his inability to reassure Americans on foreign policy, but Lieberman was dead in the water from the beginning; he had no charisma, and the left flat out hated him. Clinton's people essentially brought Wes Clarke into the race, and for a while, he looked like he might be able to put up a fight, but the fact that he didn't even compete in Iowa (which he couldn't really do) pretty much screwed him. Then Gephardt tried stepping up to the plate, and he got aggressive against Dean. The Gephardt-Dean battle really did bring down both of them, and it wounded Dean big time in Iowa, a state that hates negative politics. Kerry buckled down and campaigned like a machine, and Edwards picked up tons of support for his positive campaigning (with the aid of Kucinich-endorsed second choice votes), and those two trounced Dean in Iowa and torched him. In short, around December 03, a Dean demise was very predictable, given everything that was building up; it was just a matter of who would step up to the plate.

Ron's campaign is much different from Dean's. Dean's notariety didn't start with the internet; it started with cable news appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and, ironically probably the biggest contributor, Fox News. He was getting very early coverage from the very beginning, as he was the first to declare, and he was voicing outright opposition to the war while the Kerry-Edwards-Gephardt guys were ambivalent, at best. This got him grassroots following from the beginning, and they built that through the internet.

Ron's campaign got its network started from two sources: long-time followers on the ground who were raising some money (many of whom were hardcore big-L Libertarians who idolized him for a long time) and some hardcore libertarians who already knew about him early on spreading the word online, with the aid of sites like LewRockwell.com and social networking groups like Facebook and MySpace. The MSNBC debate poll, in which Paul won in a landslide, was produced by the online organization in place, and this is when the first rumblings started. Then the Fox News debate in South Carolina really set things off. Ron started attracting attention and support from anti-war people (left and right) and more libertarians, while getting admonishment from neocon Republicans. So for a while, his campaign was attacked relentlessly, and he was considered by the media as the "bold maverick with no chance to win." He's gradually been building more and more support and raising more and more money through the year, and he's been converting people in the party along the way, whereas Dean meteorically rose almost instantly and was already in position to be embraced by the base of his party. Ron's recent fundraising success and rapidly rising poll numbers are showing he's just now hitting his stride at the right time, and in large part, the fundraising has helped that because it's established him as legit.

In short, Ron is building a much better position for him to take the nomination than Dean had in 2004. Dean got to the point where he was looking almost inevitible for a while, and if he lost Iowa, then it could have led to a collapse, which it did. Ron can now go into Iowa and New Hampshire just needing to do "much better than expected," (I think he'll win New Hampshire, personally), and he can get the "wow, there's a lot more support than I ever imagined" buzz going, which he can carry into more states. But let's put it this way: at this point, a 3rd-place finish in Iowa will be a victory for Ron. The next month's coverage of Iowa is going to be Huckabee vs. Romney, with the expectation it will come down to those two, while Ron's poll numbers are subtlely climbing and his campaign is growing big time under the radar. If he sneaks up and snags third from Thompson and Giuliani, he flat out torches their campaigns. Period. And he grabs all the buzz and momentum from Iowa that either Huckabee or Romney would have gotten. If he then takes it to New Hampshire and wins there, my friends, we have a race on our hands.

Dean peaked too early. Ron's rising at the right time, and hasn't even peaked yet.

Naraku
11-27-2007, 09:57 AM
Bravo!

I'd like to add to that, Ron Paul does need more than just third in the race. He needs to have high numbers. If the numbers are 26% Huckabee, 21% Romney and 12% Paul it won't get much attention, but if it comes out more like 21% Huckabee, 19% Romney, and 18% Paul then it will become a major point. However, I think Paul stands a good chance of taking second in Iowa. With Romney losing conservatives and this being effectively an open caucus, Ron Paul stands a good chance of taking a lot of moderates and liberals in the party and outside the party to get high polling numbers. If Paul takes second and then takes New Hampshire, it will make him the official frontrunner.