All the polls seem to indicate this. One look at the Trent lines at RealClearPolitics.com show Giuliani comfortably ahead, and all his trend lines with an uptick as a result of his recent NRA speech, and the attack on the NY Times “Betray us” ad.

I’m a Fred-head. Fred is not doing as well, as I had hoped. I gotta admit, from here on out it’s going to be tough going against frontrunner Giuliani.

except 2 things:

1.) You can’t count Laura Ingram’s reaction as a consequence really, b/c she is a hardcore scary neocon until the end and would disparage RP and his people no matter what.

2.) Revolutionary costumes NEVER go out of vogue :))

RP needs a political, not an ideological, message. Two or three main issues would suffice.

- Humble foreign policy
- Secure the borders
- No income or inflation tax

All tied together by the freedom ideology.

Yes, we all know the platform is deeper than that and many of us focus on the deeper issues, byt if you listen to Dr. Paul from the perspective of an uninformed listener, you’ll notice that he is focusing his campaign on those issues.

He’ll answer any question that’s asked of him, which is incredibly refreshing, but when he has an open mic, he’ll choose one of his main points.

10 million isn’t first tier money (though the McCain campaign announced today they’re expecting 3.7 million), but it essentially makes him competitive with the first tier. It would probably put him third (not counting Romney’s self-contributions). For a guy with the lowest overheads of any campaign running, and as Anthony pointed out for a guy whose spending doesn’t NEED to be 30 million to get over the top of the 8 other guys all saying the same thing, 10 million dollars would be a damn good problem to have.

But I still have to be very pessimistic about RP’s chances in Iowa and New Hampshire because he just isn’t campaigning there. Both of these states are anti-war, even among Republicans. They are small so that personal appearances draws lots of coverage and advertising is relatively cheap.

They are ideal places for RP to try to jump-start his campaign, but he doesn’t seem to be trying. Instead, he’s running all over the country. Granted, much of this may be fund-raising, but unless he raises some pretty big bucks, I wonder how much it can compensate for his neglect of these two early state contests.

I’ll be interested in seeing how well Paul’s campaign raises money for the third quarter. I’m not optimistic. They seem to be aiming at something like 10 million dollars. That’s no where near first-tier money. But that may have been only the goal for one month.

The other problem is RP’s message. You can’t run on a 15-point platform. It’s too much for the public to absorb. Nor can you run on the gold standard. The public doesn’t understand it, and you haven’t got the time or resources to educate the public on Austrian Economics.

RP needs a political, not an ideological, message. Two or three main issues would suffice. In the present context, he could probably even reduce it to a single anti-war message. But he still needs a practical anti-war program. “Just get out,” isn’t enough. He needs to show how his plan will not produce more difficult problems down the road.

And on Brad’s post, keep one other thing in mind: we dont need Gulliani’s 30 million or Romney $30 million. They are spending that money to fight over the pro-war vote. We just need enough to get out Ron’s message against this war, which will take A LOT less than $30 million.

On his economic policy, he actually knows something about economics in general and knows that Keynesian economics is bullshit. His intellect is so much more advanced over the other candidates that it’s frightening. and I think people are going to be exposed to the stupidity of Paul’s competitors more and more as debates flesh it out.

In EVERY cycle, the schedules are different, but at this point in the race, there is always an appointed front-runner that does NOTHING in the end. Lieberman in 2004. E. Dole in 2000. Forbes in 1996. Kerrey in 1992. All the way back to, well, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, if you want to look at famous Republican nobodies.

In nearly every non-incumbent cycle, there is some guy that nobody’s ever heard of by halftime, that is polling in low single digits nationally right up to the first votes cast in Iowa, who ends up becoming The Major Player of that cycle. Edwards in 2004, 2000 (R) is sort of weird that way (less open field, which isn’t the case in this cycle), Clinton in 92, etc.

Polling, to a point, reflects name ID for a long, long time. Lieberman in 2000. E. Dole (and S. Forbes) in 1996. Harkin and Kerrey in 92. Etc. And EVER CYCLE, people interpret those polls to be completely obvious indicators of who is viable and who isn’t, and EVERY CYCLE they are wrong to varying extents, and EVERY CYCLE history is revised immediately following the breakouts to where it’s seen as almost inevitable that things turned out as they did, and to a man none of the king-makers and pundits say another word about how dead wrong they spent most of the cycle being. You never hear about it again. So EVERY CYCLE we go back to the same pattern, where we discuss who are obviously viable and who are obviously not, and then every cycle get that thrown in our faces to some extent.

So, with these things, lazily taking the word of conventional wisdom for “who places” is almost always a bad bet.

Some assumptions:

You have to read between the lines to some extent, and those tea leaves start looking more clear in retrospect.

In Ron Paul’s favor:

Unlike, say, 2000, or 96, for the Republicans (really, the last contested primaries in 25 years for them), this race is not a coronation. There is not a clear favorite, nor is there even a clear challenger. Nobody can get above thirty percent, and the movement of the poll indicates how wide open this race is, and how the electorate has so not settled. McCain is up, Romney down, Romney up, Rudy down, Thompson looks good….oh wait, he’s not moving at all, but Huckabee!…okay, so he hasn’t moved either. But except for his massive disapprovals and inability to take votes away from his challengers, Rudy sure has this locked up, eh? In Ron Paul’s favor: the more open a race, the farther down the anointed “tiers” voters are willing to go. Kerry/Edwards. Clinton.

This race is wide open. And not only do I think it’s possible for a 4% to break through, I will bet cold cash that of the top 3 finishers in Iowa and New Hampshire (six places total), two (plus or minus one) are currently polling less than 5%.

Second, at this point, what’s important aren’t the raw numbers, but the micro trends. Rudy getting 31% or whatever is meaningless, except to say that he gets a fair chunk of people willing to consider him early. What is significant are those smaller trends I mentioned above. In Ron Paul’s favor: his numbers, though small, have been remarkably consistent (save the normal statistical noise). 1%. 2%. 3%. 4%. My guess: next Gallup poll averaged with a few more liberal pollsters (Zogby, say), is 5%. That is absolutely a trend a winning campaign could be built on. If he jumped to 14% and then went back down to 4, I’d be worried. If he has been ahead for six months but can’t break out, I’d be worried. But that’s not the case.

Third, polling, at this point in the cycle, is much less important than other metrics. Good metrics (at this point): institutional support (admittedly sparse in Ron Paul’s case), money, and organization.

On money, Ron Paul was in the Top 5 last go-around. I will be surprised if he isn’t in the Top 4, and a very close fourth at worst, this cycle. If you think about that, it will be three guys garnering 90% of media coverage, national frontrunners all, and Ron Paul right there with them, and then everybody else. I will be further surprised if his number of individual donors this cycle isn’t Top Three. I will be even more surprised if his cash on hand, and expenditures, doesn’t leave him in a financial position that is a hugely disproportionally (to his polling) sign of strength. That’s not to say that he won’t be 25 million dollars behind Giuliani (or Thompson or whoever), but it is to say that his financial hammer will be cocked, and he will be a man apart from the rest of the second tier (though I can’t yet figure Huckabee).

Finally, on organization (and here I mean “support”, maybe “enthusiasm”, but really I mean “army”), Ron Paul has the gift that keeps on giving. His de facto organization is not just tops among the GOP, it’s right up there with Obama among all candidates running. 50,000 Meetup members is no joke. He regularly attracts crowds three or four times the size of any that the front-runners ever get. In every county in American he has a presence. And it’s a scary presence. Romney, for instance, has to pay people to be enthusiastic. Paul has the sort of folks that paint tugboats and fly signs behind planes FOR FREE. I can’t speak of Paul’s campaign staff, but his volunteer army, to a man, is going to have an effect. Will it turn an election, or will it flame out ala Howard Dean? Tough to say.

But of course, Dean’s vaulted him to frontrunner status and magazine covers all over the country, and he’s now in charge of the Democratic party.

In summary: Don’t worry about Ron Paul. He may not win, sure, and if I (we) could wave a magic wand and have him polling 70%, that would be great. But he’s right where he needs to be.

Who were the most significant players in the last open primary we had in this country, Democrats in 2004?

John Kerry and John Edwards, by a lot.

Know what they were polling in mid-September 2003?

Try this. ABC poll on September 13th, 2003.

Lieberman 21
Dean 15
Kerry 14
Gephardt 14
Clark 6
Sharpton 5
Carol Mosley-Brown 4
Edwards 3

Gallup poll, same time

Lieberman 18
Gephardt 15
Dean 15
Kerry 12
Bob Graham 5
Edwards 5

CBS/NYT, a little later, Sept 28th:

Clark 14
Dean 9
Gephardt 5
Lieberman 5
Kerry 4
Edwards 1

By November, Kerry was polling at about 7, Edwards at about 3.

Edwards never got above single digits until the day of Iowa voting.

A nice stroll down memory lane.

In 1992, though the schedules were pretty vastly different, Bill Clinton was polling at about 4% early in the race, not even blipping in the polls against Tsongas, Harkin, and Kerrey (Bob). He was down by 30 points in New Hampshire. And the funny thing was, he didn’t win either Iowa OR New Hampshire. His SECOND place win in New Hampshire (33 percent to 25 percent, to Tsongas), got him enough juju to take the nomination.

The only other non-incumbent race in the last decade+ was 2000, where John McCain and George W. Bush were neck and neck in the polls from November on (as were Bill Bradley and Al Gore, incidentally; Bradley led Gore in polls in New Hampshire all throughout). Know who the early polls in the Republican primary of 2000 favored?

“On the GOP side, John McCain has a narrow 39 percent — 34 percent edge over George W. Bush, with Steve Forbes at 15 percent and Alan Keyes at 9 percent.”

McCain led Bush in South Carolina at one point by 57 percent to 33.

I could go on.