Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Paul in N.H.   [David Freddoso]

I don't buy that St. Anselm poll, but I give this to Paul: it's indisputably easier to produce poll numbers when you've raised $7 million on the quarter and you have maybe $10 million cash on hand.

Two reasons: First, all that money convinces some folks right away — the ones watching more closely — that you're "for real." Until he raised over $5 million in the last quarter, Paul was not even remotely "for real" — he was a Republican Dennis Kucinich, a vanity candidate with no real reason to be in the race. Even after the good haul, I didn't think too much of his campaign, but now he's raised another $7 million. That's some serious money, and a lot of it was raised at almost no cost to his campaign. So New Hampshirites who already like him, who have until now considered a vote for Ron Paul to be a wasted vote, might rethink that.

Second, once you have money, you can start hitting the airwaves and reaching people who aren't watching closely. Paul's name recognition in New Hampshire is 58 percent right now among Republican primary voters, according to Rasmussen — his fav/unfav is at 26/32. So he's a net negative, but largely unknown, and not nearly as negative as one might expect — Tancredo and Hunter are both much deeper into the unfav category. So there is some upside for Paul that advertising can tap into.

So here's what a good run by Ron Paul looks like: He runs ads and spends a lot of time in New Hampshire. He boosts his name recognition among unaffiliated voters and Republicans. He wins over more Republican voters. Meanwhile, Hillary becomes a prohibitive favorite on the Democratic side, and so the unaffiliated voters decide they will skip their boring primary and vote for Paul in the GOP primary. 

At that point, Paul's supporters run another big Internet fundraiser, drawing good press and bringing in a few million more effortless dollars to be spent on last two weeks. Other conservative candidates (Thompson, Tancredo, Huckabee) fizzle in New Hampshire, and Paul (along with Romney, probably) becomes one of the beneficiaries. He takes something like 20 or 25 percent, putting him in second place and making everyone re-think the race.

Far-fetched? Yeah, sure it is. But it's not nearly as far-fetched now as it was the day before yesterday.

11/06 01:05 PMShare