A few hours ago, I received an e-mail from a Ron Paul supporter, and although the majority of the e-mail was rather condescending, the author makes an important statement that I do believe merits exploration:
You guys [at NextGenGOP] are … ignoring Ron Paul … and his contribution to gathering sincere and dedicated enthusiasm in American politics.
Indeed, the author is correct – our contributors have not really discussed the Ron Paul Revolution, despite the fact that there are a number of crucial lessons for the Republican Party to learn from his successes. Thus, without further ado, I will take this post to thoroughly explore this matter.
To his credit, Ron Paul’s campaign demonstrated that Republicans can indeed keep up with Democrats in the era of Web 2.0, particularly in the areas of grassroots organization and fundraising. In addition, his campaign won the hearts of many young voters in a way quite similar to that of President-elect Obama. This begs two critical questions: how did Ron Paul manage to accomplish these significant feats despite being widely regarded as a “fringe candidate,” and more importantly, what lessons must the Republican Party take from his success?
Ron Paul’s Successes
Let us begin by looking at the many successes of the Paul campaign, and how his performance compares to that of the two most significant candidates of the cycle: John McCain and Barack Obama.
- Ron Paul energized his supporters, resulting in an incredible outpouring of enthusiasm for his candidacy despite being supported by an extremely small percentage of voters. McCain’s campaign created a short burst of energy during his selection of Sarah Palin and the convention, but it proceeded to fizzle out as time passed. Obama’s campaign continuously energized its supporters, resulting in unbelievably massive crowds at his campaign events. A Gallup poll from October 2008 confirms this phenomenon, clearly indicating the enthusiasm gap that Democrats had over Republicans.
- Ron Paul effectively used the Internet to organize his grassroots efforts. Relying on existing infrastructures like Meetup.com – where he was able to recruit over 86,600 members in 1,150 groups that planned and held over 51,000 offline campaign events – the Paul campaign had enormous success in this arena. McCain’s website had its own network called McCainSpace, but at many levels it was not especially groundbreaking, and in contrast to the online outreach by Obama and Paul, it seemed to be used fairly lightly by supporters. In contrast, Barack Obama successfully built an incredible network at my.barackobama.com by bringing on Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Ask almost any Obama supporter, and they’ll tell you that they used Obama’s online tools in one way or another. What’s unique about Ron Paul’s success, however, is that his campaign didn’t spend enormous resources building its own tools. Instead, it successfully took advantage of tools that already existed and thus was able to build an incredibly comprehensive national grassroots network without having to spend a significant amount of its own money.
- Ron Paul’s ability to raise funds online is unparalleled in the Republican Party. Indeed, for the final quarter of 2007, Ron Paul outraised all of the other Republican Presidential candidates. McCain’s fundraising was generally unexceptional, and his strategic error in choosing to take public funding will almost certainly never happen again. And of course, we all know that Obama was a fundraising juggernaut, particularly online.
- Ron Paul strongly appealed to young voters. Exit polls for early primary states like NH, MI, SC, and FL show that a disproportionately large percentage of younger voters pulled the lever for Ron Paul (in many cases, roughly twice the percentage of votes he received from other age groups). As we know from the exit polling of the general election, these young voters overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama over John McCain: CNN pegs Obama’s advantage at 66% - 32%.
How Ron Paul’s Successes Came to Fruition
At the most basic level, it was Ron Paul’s common-sense and decidedly libertarian platform that created so much interest in his campaign. While some of his positions, such as his staunch opposition to the Iraq war, stand in stark contrast to the Republican agenda, the fact is that the core of his message is quite in line with the traditional Republican message: reducing the federal government’s size and cutting its spending.
What made Ron Paul distinct, however, was his passion and commitment to accomplishing this. If you had to identify the single most important policy issue in a hypothetical Paul administration, it would unquestionably be reduction of government. Unfortunately, you cannot unequivocally say the same about any of the other Republican candidates, and certainly not of John McCain (read: McCain-Feingold, among other things).
Ron Paul’s steadfast and unwavering commitment to his limited government principles brought a huge influx of dedicated supporters to his campaign. The resulting enthusiasm among these supporters translated into impeccable successes.
Lessons for the Republican Party
- Democrats aren’t the only ones who can fully take advantage of the Internet, both in donations and in building a grassroots organization. Indeed, you don’t even necessarily need to build new tools to win the battle online. That said, in order to see Ron Paul-like success, there are two crucial components that must exist. First, you must have enthusiastic supporters who are not only willing but excited to help the organization. Second, you must be willing to allow online tools to step into areas that have traditionally been controlled internally, such as grassroots organization.
- We cannot underestimate the importance of our ideals of smaller, less expensive government – and our candidates’ commitment to these ideals. To paraphrase a McCain stump line, Republicans were elected due to their promises to change Washington, but instead they let Washington change them. As a result, the voters turned to Democrats in 2006 and 2008, at least in part because they simply don’t trust us to keep our word. In 2010 and beyond, we need to run candidates who have a proven commitment to these principles – perhaps signing off on a Contract with America 2.0 similar to what I’ve previously suggested – and in doing so we will generate an incredible amount of enthusiasm for our candidates.
- Successfully using the Internet saves money. A lot of money. Of the major Presidential candidates, Ron Paul’s campaign devoted by far the smallest percentage of its budget to paying staffers. One of the most important reasons for this is simple: by successfully using the Internet to build the grassroots backbone of the campaign, there was considerably less need to pay staffers to organize outreach efforts. Yes, the sheer notion of such a decentralized campaign may be unsettling to those who are used to running traditional campaigns. However, Web 2.0 is shaking up the foundations of many traditional infrastructures with resounding success. If we want to survive in this new era, we need to allow it to shake up our organizations, too. Just imagine if John McCain had been able to slash his campaign’s payrolls by just 15% due to such decentralization – in fiscal year 2007 alone (well before McCain was the presumptive nominee), McCain would have been able to save $2.3 million.
- Republicans can win back the younger voting bloc. My experience has been that the vast majority of my peers – voters age 18-29 – fundamentally agree that they want the government in their lives as little as possible. The Republican Party is the party of individual freedoms and liberties, and if we can manage to resecure the public’s faith in this, we can win back young voters.
The bottom line is that we simply cannot afford to discount Ron Paul as a “fringe candidate” whose successes hold no lessons of value for the Republican Party. Instead, we must to adapt these successes into the new Republican Party. Viva la revolución!
Last 5 posts by Aaron Marks
- Happy Independence Day! - July 4th, 2009
- Rubio vs. Crist Will Prove Who Controls the GOP - May 20th, 2009
- Announcing the Petition for Our Future - May 17th, 2009
- Let's Give Young Voters a Legitimate Role in the Future of the Republican Party - May 16th, 2009
- It's Time for a Complete Reboot - May 10th, 2009
Mr. Marks,
I am sorry that you felt the email sent by the Ron Paul supporter was condescending. I obviously haven’t read it and it may have very well have been. As a Ron Paul supporter and a life long Republican, I understand the frustration of most Paul supporters with the direction of the party.
I joined the party believing in small government, lower taxes, reducing government spending, and limiting foreign interventionism. I voted for Bush and other Republicans in 2000 because they ran on this traditional platform; however, I feel that I was betrayed by the party’s eight year march to foreswear everyone of these principals and more. The bailout was one more large bail of straw on the camels back that solidified my belief that the Republican Party is not what it once was and may never be again.
I hear ramblings that the Republican party needs to become more moderate, to win back the voters who turned to Obama. I feel that is the nonsense and the worst possible move for the Party. Those voters that left us and went to Obama wanted “change.” I don’t think that many of them even understood what that change was, or that change could possibly worsen the situation. They all feel that the government is again getting us involved in foreign wars, spend more than it ever has, infringing liberties at every turn (some of which no one thought were touchable), making more enemies, and losing more respect in the world than it has in memory. They are correct and they where right for wanting change. I don’t think they are going to get change and that is the Republican’s advantage.
I think you will start to see those voters who moved to Obama become disenfranchised in the off year and certainly by 2012. They will again be looking for change, but I think they will have a much better idea what that change needs to be. Ironically, it won’t be what the Republican party is today, but what it was in the days of old. What they will want, even desperately, will be small government, lower taxes, reducing government spending, and limiting foreign interventionism.
Freedom works,
Jason Upchurch
jason d o t upchurch a t g m a i l d o t c o m
How could someone go from voting for Paul to voting for Obama? Check out this link of various people’s opinions on the top 25 things for Barack to “fix.”
Hope I did this right
Nearly half of the 25 things listed on that list are anti-government type items. Things that would weaken the power of the government.
I’m not saying I agree with those items, but many young people look at the Democrats as the party of individual freedom (that affects them or the friends) and republicans as the party of “alien” individual freedoms (things like guns, SUVs, prayer - things they don’t care at all about). Republicans need to be the party of individual freedom and not just on things that are “strange” to youth voters.
We keep the 2nd amendment freedoms and capitalist freedoms and explain the freedoms we want to protect for youth. Tie them all together.
I believe Thane is right about voters thinking the Democrats are the party of individual freedom..unfortunately they are wrong about that. Ron Reagan once said that the heart of Conservatism was Libertarianism, and I think that’s what the young people responded to so well from Ron Paul. I reviewed the link and I would say there were only a couple of things on there that I disagreed with. I’m not really comfortable with ending the drug war - although I do know it has been a miserable failure. I think I just haven’t read enough about it’s sucesses or failures to know for sure yet whether I could be in favor of that. I do think legalizing marijuana could be allowed and again turned over to the states to decide - and that’s a conservative issue because it shrinks the size of the Federal government and gives power back to the states, who could ban it if they wanted to. I do believe the Patriot act needs to be repealed because I know it allows things that are direct violations of the Constitution and while our current president may not use those powers in unintended ways, who’s to say that a future president wouldn’t. We must safeguard our privacy because our founders faught for it. There are other laws already in place that allow the intelligence gathering we need. I would also say I would not agree with federal funding for stem cell research… not because I am prolife but because I don’t believe that people should be forced into having their tax dollars used to pay for something that they find “morally abhorrent”. I believe that is a Jefferson quote. In other words, federal tax dollars shouldn’t be spent on issues that have moral strings attached, like abortion, gay marriage, religious education, etc… These things should be funded privately and voluntarily. That way, if I don’t beleive in it, I can rest assured that I’m not contributing to it and if you do, you can fund it yourself. I am finding more and more that small federal government and powerful state and local governments really are the way to solve a great percentage of our problems. And it can be presented in a way that comes across as compassionate instead of polarizing.
Like most of the posts on this young blog, the point is missed yet again. You credit Ron Paul only for fundraising, organization and youth appeal, yet fail to address the very policies that he advocates as a recommendation for the Republican Party’s future.
I’d be so much happier if the Republican primary featured 7 Ron Paul-types and 3 Huckabee/Palin/Romney-types rather than the current selection.
I’m in full agreement with Ruud. The current group of mainstream Republicans lack true principles. Ron Paul has such strong convictions for freedom, and limited government, basically the exact opposite of what we are hearing from today’s GOP. How as a Republican could Romney get away with socializing healthcare in Massachusettes? No conservative in his/her right mind would even consider the possibility of trying something so rediculous. And Republicans are looking at him to help lead the party?
Unless the Republican party can start looking at the principles and policies that guide people like Goldwater and Paul they will continue to lose to democrats because today’s GOP contrasts very little from many democrats.
Ron Paul’s staunch anti-war message was his greatest draw. His staunch small limited government pro constitutional stance was hand in hand with this.
Republicans have for a generation eroded the party into one of a socialist nationalist religious zealot filled plutocracy. Ron Paul has tried to remind the party of its conservative roots.
Libertarian ideas are at their core conservative ideas. Republicans have gone in the wrong direction and are advocates of legislating morality which is an abhorrent idea as it leads to bigger more intrusive government institutions as we see today.
The thing the Republican party needs to learn from Ron Paul and the R3volution is that the ideas of big government are the spawn of people wanting the government to solve every problem and weigh in on every dispute. This means more laws and more regulation and more government every time.
The Republicans need to take from this lesson the most salient fact that the people want this government whittled down to as small as an operational budget as possible and this includes foreign intervention. Their is no part of the constitution that allows the Republic to act as an Empire with bases in countries all over the world. We need to start shutting this down.
Look at this as the time of the Roman Empire where they abandoned Haden’s wall, marched out of England and went back to Italy for good. They did it because they could no longer afford the expense of Empire and neither can the United States today.
Michael, I especially like your statement that, “Libertarian ideas are at their core conservative ideas.” Excellent point.