THE RON PAUL BOOM….Is libertarian, um, provocateur — yeah, that’s the word — Ron Paul actually more popular than polls indicate? Andrew Sullivan hauls out the old chestnut about cell phone bias today, suggesting that Paul’s support skews young, the young use cell phones a lot, and cell phones don’t get included in telephone polls — so maybe the polls are underrepresenting Paul’s support.
Maybe indeed. But I wouldn’t bet the farm on that, pollsters being a more clever lot than Andrew and Joshua Claybourn give them credit for. But Andrew has a fallback position:
One more thought: I wonder if libertarians are more likely to have cell-phones than others?
Give it up, dude. There’s no there there. What’s really going on is that Ron Paul’s support is fantastically overrepresented in the blogosphere, which skews absurdly libertarian for reasons both historical and cultural. In the outside world, though, there’s just no support for hard core libertarianism. The reason Ron Paul is polling about 1% is because…..Ron Paul is polling about 1%.
UPDATE: Claybourn fights back here. A report from the Pew Research Center about the effect of cell phones on polling is here. I’m still not buying, though. It’s true that the cell phone problem is a growing one, but its overall effect is still pretty small, and certainly nowhere near big enough to have a noticeable impact on Ron Paul’s showing in the polls.
Anyway, come on, guys. We’re talking about a candidate who thinks we’d be best off getting rid of Social Security altogether and who wants to abolish the federal reserve, repeal the 16th Amendment, and put us back on the gold standard. This is really not a platform designed to muster up more than 1% of the vote.
