Ron Paul On Top In Iowa Because Of Support From Poor
Not only is Ron Paul in front in yet another Iowa poll, but the in-depth numbers show that his biggest support is coming from those people who have been most desperately hit by the financial crisis and its aftermath. by Walt Thiessen
(libertarian)
Thursday, December 22, 2011
An Iowa State University poll released today shows not only that Ron Paul continues to be the new leader in the race to win the support of Iowa caucus-goers, but that the largest proportion of his support is coming from the people who were most harmed by the financial crisis: the poor and disadvantaged, the working class, and the middle class. This explains why all the racist claims of his detractors are surfacing. They are not surfacing merely because he is the frontrunner (although that is certainly a motivating factor). They are surfacing because he is running very strongly among the people who have traditionally been the core supporters of the Democratic Party: the poor and disadvantaged, and because he threatens to take support away from President Obama among the politically all-important middle class.
This represents a political threat that big-spending liberals dare not wait to attack, even though the primaries have not yet begun. If Paul continues to poll well among these groups, not only will he set himself up to win the nomination, but he will become a very serious threat to President Obama's reelection hopes. It also represents a threat that big-spending conservatives dare not overlook either, and the supporters of the two leading borrow-and-spend Republicans, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, will "pile on" in the hopes of reversing this trend.
In the poll, Paul leads with 27.5% support, followed by Gingrich at 25.3% and Romney at 17.5%. Rick Perry is the only other candidate in double-digits at 11.2%. However, while those are the headline-making numbers, the much more interesting numbers are found deeper in the poll. There is solidity of support which shows that 51% of Ron Paul supporters say they are definitely backing him, compared to 16.1% for Gingrich and 15.2% for Romney. The poll's coordinator, James McCormick, professor and chair of political science at Iowa State, says that the numbers for Gingrich and Romney are "still very soft". The article also quotes Dave Peterson, interim director of the Harkin Institute of Public Policy at Iowa State and associate professor of political science who assisted with the poll. He says, "I think Paul probably under-polls. His supporters are younger and more likely to reply on a cell phone, so he's probably going to perform better than his polling suggests. His supporters also are dedicated and will likely turn out on caucus night and not change their minds."
But the most interesting numbers describe in detail where Paul gets his greatest support. He gets 50% of the vote from voters whose annual income is below $25,000 and 43.5% of the vote from voters who make between $50,000 and $75,000. Curiously, the same poll shows that for voters making $25,000 to $50,000 his support is only at 14.3%, but I suspect that is an anomaly that will iron itself out as the Paul campaign continues to gain steam.
The fact that Paul is doing so well among the poor, the unemployed working class, and the middle class shows that his economic plan is striking a chord with these voters, in contrast to the economic plans of all his Republican rivals and President Obama, all of whom have adopted a borrow-and-spend mentality. The fact that Paul is the only candidate in the race who has proposed a way to balance the budget his first year in office, combined with his proposal to level the money supply and stop the Fed from continuing to manipulate the money supply for the benefit of the bankers, has not been lost on these voters. To the contrary, they recognize that Paul is the only candidate who is actually on their side. This creates a threat the big-spending liberal Democrats and big-spending conservative Republicans dare not wait to attack. Since liberal Democrats in particular cannot win based on their failed policies, and since playing the race card has proven time and again to be extremely effective in destroying political careers, they see playing that card as the best way to stop the Paul campaign before it really gets a head of steam.
However, they may be too late. With Paul already leading in Iowa and perhaps preparing to move way out in front in that state, it sets up the scenario where Paul moves out of "spoiler" status and into "frontrunner" status. It is too early to predict that Paul will run away with the Iowa caucuses, and indeed it would be foolish to do so, but the trend is there beyond question. With just 12 days left until the Iowa Caucuses, it is safe to say that things are about to get very, very interesting!
Another statistic from the poll is that Gingrich leads Paul among self-described tea party supporters by an overwhelming margin, 42.4% to 9.1%. This is one more piece of proof that today's tea party is really nothing more than the neo-con-led mainstream of the Republican Party masquerading as rebels. They don't actually rebel against big government. Rather, they rebel against big government Democrats and support big government Republicans. The tea party leaders are trying to leverage popular dissatisfaction with politicians in general by claiming to be the rebels, when all along they've been driven by and led by the Republican elite who lost power in 2008. In reality, they are losing their legitimacy as rebels. I'm hoping that as this trend becomes more and more obvious, the tea party rank-and-file may finally wake up to how the Republican elite have been leading them so effectively by the nose.
However, these are merely side-points. The main point is that the Paul surge among voters who have been most hurt by the financial crisis and the economic calamity that followed is pointing to a trend that will likely become a mainstay of the Paul campaign. As this trend unfolds, it will put Paul more and more firmly into the mainstream, no matter what the political elite and the mainstream media try to do to prevent this from happening.
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