Ron Paul wins CPAC, Romney 2nd, Johnson 3rd,Palin 9th LOL

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2011 CPAC Presidential Ballot Straw Poll Results:

Ron Paul – 30 percent

Mitt Romney – 23 percent

Gary Johnson – 6 percent

Chris Christie – 6 percent

Newt Gingrich – 5 percent

Tim Pawlenty – 4 percent

Michele Bachmann – 4 percent

Mitch Daniels – 4 percent

Sarah Palin – 3 percent

Herman Cain – 2 percent

Mike Huckabee – 2 percent

Rick Santorum – 2 percent

John Thune – 2 percent

Jon Huntsman – 1 percent

Haley Barbour – 1 percent

Other – 5 percent

Undecided –1 percent

Next stop: Iowa.

I hope Paul becomes the GOP canidate. He's the only GOPer I would consider voting for.

Though I still have the feeling he probably won't make the GOP's Presidental choice in lieu of better useful and polarizing idiots.

In other words, look towards a Romney-Obama battle in 2012. If Romney has significant support among the hard-right base at CPAC, and also has his mainstream/establishment/centrist credentials, he has the best shot at winning the nomination. He's also pretty much the only contender I've seen put forward who would have a snowball's chance in hell of actually challenging Obama in the general election.

The CPAC is libertarian rather than conservative, but Paul is less popular among Republicans and Indepedents.

Romney won't win the nomination, the Tea Party will be 100% against him. He couldn't even beat a loser like McCain last time and now he'll have significant opposition to his policies. He created Romneycare, the basis for Obamacare, he can not run away from it. He's got the old time establishment supporting him and pretty much no one else. Neither will Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin(or Trump LOL). Negatives just way too high. Huckabee is the biggest threat out of the usual suspects but you gotta start taking Paul seriously as a candidate, he has the grassroots support and wide appeal of an outsider and true father of the Tea Party. It's wide open.

BTW, Romney won CPAC 3 times in a row before Dr. Paul won the last two.

Paul is very popular among independents btw. Obama would **** his pants if he had to run against him and would have to wage the nastiest lie infested campaign in American history to retain power.

Ron Paul doesn't stand a snowball's chance in an erupting volcano of being elected nationally.

The question is whether the Tea Party is actually powerful enough to determine the national nominee of the GOP. They may be powerful enough to block candidates they really hate, but remember McCain did not have the full backing of the conservative base and he won the nomination. If the Tea Party does manage to get their own candidate on the national GOP ticket, I unhesitatingly predict a repeat of 1964.


Well, if Romney showed strong CPAC support he has a chance. The real problem for him is that he will not be approved either by the Tea Party faction or (the traditionally important) evangelical wing. Depending on what the major issues of the 2012 election are, I could even consider supporting Romney.


Nope. Huckabee will get some hype and will do moderately decently in the primaries, but he will not be nominated, and if nominated he will be crushed in the general election. He doesn't have sufficient support among the pro-business wing of the GOP, and that's where Romney's real support is.


The Tea Party was pretty quickly co-opted by Fox News and other interests, and I don't think Paul will even be able to command full Tea Party support, given his foreign policy ideals being so far out of line with the neoconservative faction that has been so prominent over the last 10-15 years.


Nah, Paul is disregarded by the establishment on both sides. The GOP establishment won't likely allow him to be nominated, and in the general election campaign he's going to have trouble. That one newsletter from the 80s will be drudged up and he'll be painted as a racist, and called a kook for all sorts of other reasons. No one watching the debates is going to be interested in a lecture on Austrian economics.


So, wanna book a skiing trip in Hell? I agree with you.

No way there will be a repeat of 1964. Kennedy did not just die and Obama is no LBJ. There only comparison I can see will be the likely the nastiness and the fear mongering that Obama would have to resort to win.

I think it would be a pretty clear choice, on one hand you'd have some one truly against all these unconstitutional wars, the torture, who is for common sense economics(You say people won't be interested in hearing Austrian economics, they sure as hell don't want to hear Keynesian economics where you can somehow spend yourself out of debt), and represents real change. And then your have Obama.

If the supposedly the anti-war folks that lean left vote for Obama, they'll expose themselves truly as frauds. Obama 2nd term = Bush 4th term.

Ron wins in 2012 or Rand wins in 2016.

Last edited by Jacoby on 12 Feb 2011, 10:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ron Paul is the one of the few I know of in Washington who can shake up the establishment and perhaps loosen it's hold. I don't agree with the man on all issues, but I feel it'd be worth it to just knock the establishment down a peg.
Sadly, that's the same reason he won't get the candidacy.

I mean a repeat in terms of the electoral rout from nominating a candidate far to the right of the American mainstream, thus allowing a disappointing liberal to stay in office. I doubt Obama would ever manage to rise (sink?) to LBJ's level of dirtiness, though. LBJ really set the gold (or perhaps brown?) standard for mudslinging.


Paul will be depicted as a kook and a racist in the media. Whether or not those accusations are actually true is irrelevant.


Right, Obama's foreign policy has either simply followed Bush's plans exactly (in Iraq) or even escalated (in Afghanistan). That's not what the electorate wanted.

The whole newsletter controversy is stupid. They've been trying to smear Ron with it for 15 years now. Hasn't worked, won't ever work. He didn't write them, he didn't have anything to do with them. It's a fake controversy. It's slanderous to even suggest so and if the democrats want to lose the white vote forever they should keep accusing everyone of being racist, it will come back to bite them in the ass hard.

There is absolutely no way Obama routs the next election. I agree that he'd be a favorite in betting odds right now but he's not a popular president, this country is way to partisan. A rout is today by today's standard was what Obama won by in 2008. If that's what you mean maybe, but Obama isn't coming anywhere close to 65-35% win.

A big part of the reason LBJ won by so much was because Goldwater was painted as a crazy war hawk that wanted the drop the bomb. Obama obviously can't do that.

What I expect will be that he's too old, he's going to get rid of social security, he wants to repeal the civil rights act, etc. Just foolishness and lies. Obama has nothing to run on. He couldn't hold LBJ's jock as a politician. Unless the economy goes into a miraculous comeback in the next 2 years, anybody has a chance vs Obama.

Well, that may be true, but in a national campaign Paul will get slammed repeatedly for that, and it will definitely hurt whatever chances he has.


Obama-Palin or Obama-Paul, and perhaps even Obama-Huckabee, could be almost that lopsided a vote, especially if the unemployment rate drops by any significant amount before then or if the GOP behaves foolishly in Congress. Now, the popular vote will not likely be that lopsided, simply because the nature of elections has changed since LBJ's time and better-targeted media efforts will always make it closer, but in terms of certainty of outcome, and extreme lopsidedness in the Electoral College, we can expect a Tea Party-backed candidate to perform badly on par with Goldwater.


He could paint Paul as a crazy racist who wants to destroy the modern economic system and hoard gold, while completely withdrawing from foreign affairs and shunning the rest of the world entirely. Whether any of these accusations are 100% accurate is irrelevant, as Goldwater wasn't actually going to initiate a nuclear war but he was still destroyed by such allegations.


True. LBJ was the consummate politician- a filthy, corrupt, lying dirtbag.


No, he would still destroy Palin or Huckabee. Honestly, I would say he still has a good chance against almost anyone the GOP puts forward, simply because the GOP has been struggling with severe internal tensions for the past several years, and it will be difficult if not impossible to satisfy the whole big-tent coalition that they need to win.

Too early to say really.

I'd say Romney has the best shot. But he needs to walk through fire in the primaries defending his history with health care mandates.

Actually, Newt Gingrich stands a good shot in the fact that he balanced the budget in the 1990s you can argue Clinton has some credit too, but still. The other individual is Sarah Palin, because at this point the way liberals keep attacking her its getting to the point people are thinking her critics are simply deranged.

The interaction between right-wing congressional Republicans and a center-left Democrat like Clinton was good for our budget. But I think Gingrich has been out of the limelight a bit too long to make a serious White House bid now. I think 2012 might be Romney's year, unless the Tea Party really keeps their momentum and expands going into the primaries, in which case it's hard to guess who will be nominated, but it won't be someone who was big in the 90s.


Not really. The popular perception of Palin is that she's a bimbo, and even the Republican base generally does not regard her as Presidential material. She could get maybe 50% support or slightly more from the Republican party, 0.01% support from Democrats, and very low Independent support.

lol Newt is a joke, a failure as speaker and as a person, and a fake conservative to top it off. He's unlikable and an egotistical scumbag. He should stick to writing terrible fiction novels and cheating on his wife.(he's on what #3 or 4 not?)

Palin really isn't worth talking about anymore. I hope she's smart enough to not run for president but that's a lot of to ask of her I guess. She really provides nothing of substance. She can barely regurgitate neocon talking points. Her resigning as governor pretty much ended her political relevancy. She's not qualified to be president and her negatives are through the roof. She's got a good thing going with the reality TV gig. Bachmann has effectively overtaken her role.

If you look at the issues that the Tea Party and the folks that co-opt it into the GOP, you'll know that there is only one man who truly stands for constitutional small government conservatism. They've been ripping his message the last few years in an effort to shed the big government neocon reputation that GOP has rightfully gained. I just hope the public isn't fooled and I don't think they will be.

Romney probably could win the presidency if he got the nomination, he's just like Obama but he'd probably actually be able to push legislation. God help us.

The GOP nomination will be a "Tea Party" candidate, I'll guarantee it. Whether it's the real Tea Party or the neocon rip-off I dunno but that is where ALL the momentum is. Just look at this past November.