Yes, Ron Paul's Poll Results are Valid

FreshVision - For the record, I’ve openly rebuked Ron Paul supporters for “shady” poll practices in the past. I’ve seen countless instances where Paul’s e-activists slam polls that do not in any way involve Ron Paul, nor are they relevant to his campaign. One of these polls, for example, can be found on the Blogs for Fred Thompson blog.

The poll asks “Will Fred Thompson win the GOP primary?”. A wiki style page crafted to direct Ron Paul internet traffic to polls and pages sent more than 500 visits to the site within a few hours. Naturally, with most of these visits being Ron Paul fans, the poll was slammed with “no” votes.

What this does, in my opinion of course, is it renders the poll useless and irrelevant. THIS is the only area where I see the poll mongering being played out in a less than honest manner.

When it comes to actual Presidential polls, however, I now believe we should be paying far more attention to the results. I’ve drawn this conclusion thanks to the recent straw poll conducted by PoliticalDerby.com at the Conservative Leadership Conference.

I had the privilege of serving as conference director for CLC this year. Playing a significant role in the planning and implementation of a conference of this scale was not only an honor, but also a huge learning experience when it comes to conservative politics.

I learned that the conservative realm, specifically the fiscal conservatives, are far more Libertarian than most realize. The conference this year was heavily supported by the Libertarian party. A handful of the attendees mentioned that they would have liked to see the GOP be more involved, but for the most part the general consensus was that the Libertarian flavor was a welcomed addition to the limited-government minded conference.

And as a side note, the GOP was given ample opportunity to be involved. In fact, Jo Anne Davidson of the RNC was originally scheduled to discuss conservatism with Bill Redpath, chair for the Libertarian Party, but she “backed out” at the last minute.

As a chief organizer for CLC, I left the conference feeling ignored by the GOP, and embraced by limited-government Libertarian Party. So if anyone here is to blame for lack of inclusion of the GOP, it is the GOP itself.

But I digress…

Back on the Ron Paul subject. Many in the media, as well as in the ranks of the Republican party, almost instantly tried to discount the results for the CLC straw poll once PolitcalDerby.com made them public.

The problem with this is, this straw poll was conducted on one of the most level playing fields I’ve ever seen. I watched how the straw poll at CPAC was conducted earlier this year, and I’ve studied the process at several other venues since. The straw poll at CLC was carefully conducted by a very trusted group of associates. The process was also heavily debated and discussed in the weeks prior to the actual event.

We knew there was a potential for “cheating” and we took what we saw as the proper steps to ensure fair and relevant results.

Judging by the way that other straw polls have ended, we thought it was safe to assume that Romney or Hunter would come out ahead. Romney had a heavy presence at CLC, providing a townhall style meeting as well as a major mid day speech. Duncan Hunter also made a major speech and his supporters turned out in numbers similar to that of Ron Paul.

Ron Paul had a booth in the exhibit hall, but was not present at CLC.

With all of this in mind, we figured that Romney would probably take the lead with Hunter and Paul close behind. This was just a guess, but it made sense at the time.

When the results began to take shape, however, it was clear that the true limited-government minded conservatives present at CLC just didn’t click with any of the major candidates. In fact, Ron Paul walked away with a significant victory.

Ron Paul
32.80%

Mitt Romney
16.13%

Duncan Hunter
14.52%

Undecided
11.29%

Fred Thompson
7.53%

Rudy Giuliani
6.45%

Alan Keyes
3.76%

Mike Huckabee
3.23%

Tom Tancredo
1.61%

John McCain
1.08%

Other
1.08%

Sam Brownback
0.54%

Not only did we carefully watch the entire process, we counted twice. And, when the results were announced at the awards banquet on Saturday evening, the crowd erupted in applause at the news that Ron Paul had indeed won by a landslide.

The bottom line is that several hundred limited-government conservatives met here in Reno, Nevada, and agreed that none of the top tier candidates had their support.

This is one poll that simply cannot be argued. Ron Paul won the CLC straw poll fair and square.

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