Ron Paul in Iowa: Dollars & Cents Challenge Wisdom of Pollsters
Jim Babka on Jan 2nd 2008
Iowa has 2,982,000 people, or .98% of the total U.S. population. To keep things simple, we’ll round that percentage to 1%.
Ron Paul raised money from 130,000 individual donors — in the fourth quarter alone (The campaign indicates that 107,000 of those were new donors). But we’ll be very, very conservative and estimate that there are no additional donors from previous quarters who have not repeated in the fourth quarter.
We can guesstimate that the number of Iowans supporting Ron Paul financially is about 1,300.
And, lo and behold…
RonPaulGraphs.com shows unique donors captured from the official Ron Paul campaign web service. I don’t understand how their system works. For some reason their numbers are not comprehensive. However, they have a very large sample of 68,419 Q4donors, or 56% of the official total.
According to that same report, 669 Iowans gave. If that represents approximately 56%, then about 1,194 Iowans gave to his campaign (since it’s a sample, we can’t be exact).
We’ll go with the lower, more precise number.
Republicans hope that 100,000 people turn out for the Iowa GOP caucuses. But enthusiasm is waning in the GOP and the Democrats have a very interesting competition, so the “experts” are betting the number will be closer to 80,000.
In a six way field, 34% of the votes should, almost certainly, result in a win. That would mean that the winner needs between 27,200 and 34,000 votes. We’ll go with the higher turnout figure because that represents a bigger hurdle for the Paul campaign.
For Ron Paul, the necessary donor to voter ratio to get 34% is is 1 donor extrapolates to 28 voters.
I couldn’t quickly find a reliable source (just speculation) for the realistic expectations of a traditional candidate’s donor-to-voter extrapolation. But this conservative 1 = 28 figure is, almost certainly, very, very low. And the other campaigns will have to turn out far, far more voters per donor to do anything approaching the percentages the pollsters are reporting.
But the question is, given the enthusiasm for Paul’s campaign, have a higher than normal percentage of his supporters given money to this particular campaign? …and if so, how much higher?
Thanks to mainstream media support, the Huckabee, Romney, and McCain campaigns will do far better than than that ratio. But we don’t have their donor figures, so we can’t tell if they need 100 voters for each donor, or 150 voters for each donor, or more.
But let’s take Paul’s analysis further because it sheds light on a potential problem for the pollsters.
To get 17%, Ron Paul would only need to get 14 voters per donor. Remember, that figure is based on a lower than actual donor count and a high Iowa caucus turnout.
It’s hard to imagine 100 voters per donor for Romney is easier to achieve than 14 voters per donor for Paul. Paul has an impressive grassroots army and is competitive in the sign wars.
The consensus of professional pollsters would have you believe Paul is at a mere 7-8% in Iowa (GOP pollsters have him at 4-6%). Well, then each of his donors would yield him only 7 (or fewer) voters. I can’t imagine any of the campaigns doing that poorly.
And polls have found that percentages of Republicans, ranging from anywhere from the high 40s to the low 70s, believe that the troops should be brought home from Iraq, either immediately or within in a year. Iowa is one of the most traditionally anti-war states. Ron Paul is the only GOP candidate speaking for bringing the troops home and that’s the part of his message that is most reported by the media. And so I just find it very, very hard to believe that Paul’s ratio is as low as the polls report.
Yesterday, I predicted, based on a proprietary and statistically acceptable analysis of the work of the professional pollsters, that Ron Paul would get 12%. Looking at it in dollars and cents, even that percentage, higher than any “respectable” poll, feels low.
Filed in The Bureau
I’m voting for Mrs. Clinton she looks like she could be the mom next door. We need a motherly figure in the whitehouse for a nice change.
This is very interesting, but the only thing that I don’t see it taking into account is the Democrats and Independents that are surely giving that might not take part in the voting.
-Deco
Your motherly figure wants to take care of all of us. Sounds nice but how can she do it? We will gave to give up much (money, choices…)
Sounds like socialism to me.
wtf? hillary does not in ANY way equal a motherly type. are you fu@#$ing crazy ? or do you just not really look at peoples political aspirations bfore deciding? Mrs. Clinton is a warmongering, liar. ys I said liar. type “hillary liar” into youtube and you will have audio proof. come on Deco!
“RonPaulGraphs.com shows unique donors captured from the official Ron Paul campaign web service. I don’t understand how their system works. For some reason their numbers are not comprehensive.”
The maker of RonPaulGraphs.com is monitoring the feed that the Ron Paul website puts out to drive that donation widget you see on their front page. It is constantly putting out the latest donation total as well as the last 10 or so donors(with state).
The reason it isn’t comprehensive is that on the money-bomb days, people were donating at a pace of 100’s of donors an hour. Therefore if more than 10 come in a minute, those extra donor names will likely get lost.
Still a pretty cool website the guy did just tapping into the public donation data feed. Has nothing to do with the campaign whatsoever.
Meant to say that donations were coming in at a pace of 1,000’s of donors an hour.
Here’s another site that shows the donation rates on the moneybomb days:
http://paulcash.slact.net/November-5th/
http://paulcash.slact.net/December-16th/
Up over 3,000 ppl/hr much of the evening.
Douglas, I didn’t mean for my comment about RonPaulGraphs.com to sound derogatory. I love what he’s done and it was very helpful in writing this post. Thanks for explaining how it works.
“…I don’t see it taking into account is the Democrats and Independents that are surely giving that might not take part in the voting.” -FlSean
In Iowa, you can change your party affiliation at the caucus. I don’t think that there is a greater chance for Democrats and Independents to give to a Paul campaign and not show, than for Republicans to give to a campaign and not show. But even if this were so, in 2004, Kucinich received money from about 50 people yet drew 1500 votes. That’s 30 voters per doner. And this was in a contest were the front-runner, Dean, failed to place first or second, and Kucinich languished in the polls (i.e. never even had a shot).
When Paul draws 30 voters per doner, that will be 36,000 voters. The Democrats that I know that support Paul, have already changed their party, and feel that there is not a big difference between the Democrat front-runners, and the polls in IA seem to support that. The three front-runners are tied not because of a great inter-party struggle, but because they are all the same. The Republican Party has a much more interesting contest because of Paul. Watch the independent and Democrat voters flock to the GOP to, if nothing else, teach Republicans a lesson. As a life-long Republican and anti-corporatist, I welcome Democrat support for the conservative Paul.
It’s hard to imagine a situation where Paul fails to achieve third - most of his supporters would walk through a blizzard for the honor of caucusing/voting for him; the caucus is early on a work night; and Kansas is playing in the Orange Bowl on caucus night starting at exactly the same time as caucus events - 7:00pm Central.
From the Federal Election Commission (via OpenSecrests.org), these are the results from 2000:
Candidate Votes (%) Donors (%) Voters per donor
Bush 35,231 41 492 53% 72
Forbes 26,198 30 85 9% 308
Keyes 12,268 14 144 15% 85
Bauer 7,323 9 112 12% 65
McCain 4,045 5 92 10% 44
Hatch 882 1 10 1% 88
Total 85,947 935
Note: Steve Forbes is very wealthy and funded his own campaign.
If Ron Paul is more bark than bite and generates half of McCain’s voter/donor ratio (44/2 = 22) and 1% of donors come from Iowa (~1300 donors from Q2-Q4 of 2007) then 28,600 votes will be generated. If 100k voters caucus Republican then that is 28% of the vote. Add to the mix neocons and ballot fraud against Paul and Paul’s votes go down 10% to 26% of the total.
Romney is at 31%, Huckster at 28% and you can see how Paul can surprise everyone by finishing 3rd in Iowa!
Very encouraging for Paul. We’ll know on January 3rd whether this donor/voter pattern is a reliable indicator or just a general correlation. Would you be willing to give us an update of the actual ratios for each candidate after the caucus? You could estimate donor numbers for the other candidates by extrapolating from their Q3 reports.
Hilary looks like the cranky old lady who’s always calling the cops to complain about noise or weeds instead of being polite and letting me know directly.
As for Ron Paul’s supporters in Iowa: good luck turning the corporate news machine on its ear! It can be done, and you can do it!
Great work everyone, all this information within a day of posting… You all must be some of the Ron-Paul-Internet-Robots that I keep hearing about… So who wants to bet that Fox News only shows the top two finishers tonight?