Tracking Ron Paul

I talked with Kent Snyder, Ron Paul's campaign manager, yesterday, for an article I'm doing for the Register's Sunday Commentary section (I'll link when it goes up there). Just today, the campaign announced that during the third quarter the Paul campaign had raised $5.08 million, which just might be enough for him to start getting some attention from the "mainstream" media. However, MSNBC managed to do a whole story on its latest poll (with the WSJ), which shows that Republican voters want somebody "different" from President Bush rather than "pretty much the same" by a 48-38 margin (previously it was 51-41 the other way) without so much as mentioning Ron Paul's name.

The money was bolstered by a last-week-of-the-quarter challenge from the campaign to supporters: please donate $500,000 in the next week so we can end the quarter with a money cushion. Supporters did that in three days, so the challenge was increased to $1 million. No problem. By September 30 supporters had sent in more than $1.2 million.

Here are some interesting statistics Kent Snyder gave me (as of Tuesday, probably higher today). RonPaul has 49,928 MeetUp group members in 771 cities and 22 countries (including one in the Green Zone in Baghdad). So far they've held 7,671 events.

As for YouTube, which wasn't a factor in previous campaigns but is this year, Ron has 29,489 subscribers and 4,339,507 views of videos in which he is featured. Barack has more views (11,197,523) but only 11,264 subscribers. Every other candidate has fewer, by pretty substantial margins. Giuliani, for example, has 2,467 subscribers and 655,000 views, Romney has 3,076 and 926,547, McCain has 1,631 and 483,174, while Hillary has 6,089 and 926,547.

Whatever happens electorally, the Paul campaign has become the largest pro-freedom mass movement in recent history, and it can't help but have a lasting impact.