Ron Paul unarguably has the most vocal online supporters of any of the Presidential candidates. The more, shall we say, ‘passionate’ of those supporters are sometimes called Paulbots or Paultards by social media users who don’t appreciate their aggressive, and often over the top, approach to promoting their candidate.
But if Ron Paul has so much virtual support nationwide, why isn’t he winning the Republican primary in reality?
Several weeks ago, Politico’s James Hohmann asked a similar question, he specifically wondered why the thousands of people attending Paul’s campaign rallies were not materializing into votes for Paul.
Jack Hunter, the Paul campaign’s National Blogger, told Red Alert Politics he had no idea why the phenomenon was occurring.
“It makes you wonder, these are the same people who get involved with this process and become delegates to state conventions, and volunteer their time and they call and what not and show up at the rallies . . it’s baffling,” he said.
But ask any hardcore Paul supporter why he’s losing, and they’ll likely tell you it’s a conspiracy theory to keep Paul out of office.
One former grassroots organizer for Paul stopped short of calling the conundrum a conspiracy, but told me he believed it was mass voter fraud.
“It’s been documented in almost every primary and caucus so far, “ he said. “The Establishment really doesn’t want him to win, and they have resorted to fabricated election returns.”
He named the Iowa and Maine caucuses as prime examples of where Paul was cheated, though no actual proof exists. Paul supporters in Georgia may be on to something, though, after a video recently surfaced of Georgia GOP officials denying attendees at a recent county convention the opportunity to vote on delegates to the district convention.
Paul supporters also blame the media for Paul’s poor performance, claiming that if the media treated him like a serious candidate for president, people would take him more seriously.
But how many Paul supporters have stopped to consider that other, less sinister reasons exist for Paul’s losses?
A quick look at Ron Paul’s facebook and twitter pages shows that there’s one Ron Paul supporter who’s not using social media well – and his name is Ron Paul.
Paul’s campaign primarily uses his pages to share pictures and articles about the candidate and information about campaign rallies, yet they do not use the page to organize supporters to Get Out the Vote (GOTV).
Not once in 2012 has the campaign reminded fans to register to vote on its facebook or even to vote on the day of key contests. Paul’s twitter feed provides the same outlook.
For a campaign whose facebook posts get anywhere from 2,000 to 8,000 likes on average, the Paul campaign has not made good use of social media as a way to organize volunteers the way Obama so famously did in 2008.
Online messages to his supporters via his social media channels explaining the importance of voting could actually make a big difference in Paul’s numbers.
“I think a lot of his supporters are Independents or Democrats that are fed up with Obama but are too lazy to register Republican,” said the former Paul organizer. “That or they morally object to calling themselves Republicans.”
He may be on to something.
In a very informal survey I took at Paul’s “Final Push” rally in Virginia ahead of Super Tuesday, I found that 39 of the 50 Paul supporters ages 18 to 30 that I spoke with said they would not vote for the GOP nominee – namely Mitt Romney – in the general election if Paul were to lose the primary even if Rand Paul were the Vice Presidential nominee.
A common refrain among interviewees was that they’d write Ron Paul in if he were not on the ballot. Only four of the respondents identified their political views as “center-left” on the political spectrum, with 10 of the remaining respondents firmly putting themselves in the center-right column. The others either outright called themselves independents or said they were unsure where they fell on the political spectrum.
Furthermore, during the New Hampshire primary the Paul campaign did not only avoid media contact, Paul’s state communications director was incredibly rude to me and limited my contact with volunteers to two volunteers who she made stand outside in the cold to talk to me while she stood there monitoring their every word and then abruptly ended the second interview to usher them back inside.
While some of Paul’s problems probably do stem from an unfriendly national media and shady state and local GOP officials, Paul supporters need to take a step back and recognize that some of the Ron Paul 2012 campaign’s problems have been self-inflicted. The campaign has not used its huge online community to its advantage, nor has Paul’s online community mobilized for Paul the way it should have.
IE: Writing “Ron Paul 2012” in the comment section of this article doesn’t count as helping Ron Paul. Don’t do it.
