The Rise of Ron Paul

I'm not sure how far we should take this analogy, but Ron Paul is to the Republicans of 2008 as Howard Dean was to the Democrats of 2004: the one candidate speaking out prominently against the war when his colleagues were silent or supportive. Since politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, we shouldn't be surprised that he's starting to take off online.

A week ago, Robert Smith of NPR did an interview with me on what he called the "fringe candidates"--specifically Paul and former Senator Mike Gravel--and how and why the internet might be helping their candidacies. Most of the interview of course didn't end up on air, but I was pretty satisfied with the two sound-bites from me that did make it in: the first made the point that Paul was benefiting from the net's libertarian-leaning culture, and the second noted that whenever you create a site with interactive elements, people will play with them and create unintended consequences. I called this the "Sanjaya effect," after the American Idol contestant who was propelled towards the finals of that show in part because of websites like VotefortheWorst.com and pranksters like Howard Stern who used the show's voting system to throw its producers a literal screwball.

But after spending a little more time looking closely at Paul's rising popularity online, I think it's unfair to keep calling him a fringe candidate or to attribute much of his success to any "Sanjaya effect." Paul is clearly gaining some traction in the electorate, and I think the reason is obvious.

First, the evidence. You probably have already heard that Paul was hot on the social news site Digg.com and that he's been at or near the top of current search terms on Technorati. Given that a devoted core of people can temporarily boost results on those sites if they want, it's easy to dismiss those signs. But consider this: in the last few days--ever since the televised Republican debate last week where Paul and Rudy Giuliani had their highly visibly confrontation over the roots of 9-11--Paul has had a big jump in four metrics that I think are very significant: the number of Ron Paul Meetups, the number of people "demanding" a Ron Paul appearance in their city on Eventful.com, the number of people subscribing to his YouTube channel, and the overall number of blog posts mentioning his name. All of these are platforms that are hard to game.

At the moment, there are 134 "Ron Paul 2008" Meetups with almost 4,900 members and nearly another 2,000 people listing themselves as interested in joining one. Many of these started in the last few days, so I wouldn't be surprised to see his numbers rise as those groups mature. Paul has more Meetups than anyone else, though when you look at the others it's clear they have more mature membership among the meetings that have formed. There are currently 66 Meetups for Barack Obama (with about 5,500 members and another 2,100 interested), 47 for John Edwards (with 9,000 members and another 7,000 interested) and 36 for Dennis Kucinich (12,600 members and another 11,600 interested). Given that Meetup organizers have to pay a modest subscription fee I don't think you can claim that a tiny group of Ron Paul fanatics are somehow gaming this platform. (And by the way, it's clear that the other campaigns ought to shake loose some cash and get some of their unorganized supporters together--259 people listing themselves as interested in a Kucinich Meetup in Seattle? Talk about low-hanging fruit.)

On Eventful, demand for Paul is vastly outstripping demand for any other Republican candidate. If you look at our tracking chart, he'd be in a close second behind Hillary Clinton were we to put him alongside the Democrats. I asked Eventful founder and CEO Brian Dear how they make sure their site isn't gamed and he wrote back:

In the year or so since Eventful Demand has launched, we've seen different attempts at gaming the system, and we've added a variety of mechanisms to detect patterns of abuse and prevent spoofing and other cheating activity. We look at all the obvious factors, including email address, IP address, as well as other things to help us determine if a user's demand activity is legit.
Last summer, we were seeing some pretty impressive, large-scale attempts at cheating, but we quickly went in and added countermeasures and put a stop to it.
Any kind of online polling / voting system is going to have some small percentage of people who take it as a challenge to attempt to cheat or game the system, so it's something we will always have to be wary of and continue to monitor for new exploits. But for the most part we're to the point where we're confident the vast majority of demands are legitimate, whether they're for concerts by musical artists or speeches by political figures.
As for Ron Paul's demands: among Republican campaigns, his campaign has been the real early adopter for Eventful Demand. They've vigorously pushed Eventful Demand to his supporters -- I see "Demand Ron Paul" links on the Ron Paul official site, MySpace page, in blog posts, social networks, etc. That, plus all the protections we have built-in to Eventful Demand make me highly skeptical of the theory that Ron Paul's demand activity is simply "the work of a dozen people."
Rather, my guess is that Ron Paul's libertarian roots appeal to a significant number of techie web users. Also, the rest of the Republicans simply haven't been anywhere near as active as Paul's campaign in appealing to the Netroots, which leaves Ron Paul as the current leader at least in online activity.

All good points. Two more signs that interest and support for Paul is real, as opposed to artificially inflated: He's got nearly twice as many subscribers to his YouTube channel (10,638) than Obama (5,776). And just look at the huge jump in the number of blog posts mentioning his name in the last week:

Posts that contain "ron Paul" per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Why is Ron Paul catching a wave online? A recent poll of likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers found that a majority want the U.S. to withdraw all of its military forces from Iraq in the next six months. We already know that the Iraq War is unpopular across the country and obviously within the Democratic base. Even if these numbers from Iowa Republicans are exaggerated, there still must be a sizable minority of Republicans who are fed up with the war. And right now Ron Paul is the only Republican presidential candidate who is speaking to them. No wonder people are gravitating to him in the one medium that allows grass-roots voters to self-organize and demonstrate their own affiliations and passions, the internet.