August GOP Primary Online Straw Poll

Matt Margolis of GOPBloggers has his latest online poll up. While we have the ability to do our own here at the Grok, we are placing Matt’s here for our readers to participate in because, of all the online polls one sees, his is a little more extensive and will hopefully provide, for whatever it’s worth, a more "scientific" result.

As an interesting sidenote, Matt tells us he has intentionally left Ron Paul off the ballot:

Some of you may be wondering about the absence of Ron Paul from this months straw poll. Let me explain. After my decision to include Ron Paul in the previous poll, I monitored (to the best of my ability) the efforts by Paul’s online supporters. With the help of other bloggers, we discovered a sophisticated coordinated effort to spam the poll, obfuscate their actions, and even cheat the poll.

Unfortunately, while this might not be any big deal for a simple, basic poll where one can simply discount the poll-swarmed Paul votes, it wreaks havoc for a more intensive attempt at a true online survey.

Ron Paul has been removed from this months poll in order to provide usable data on the acceptability/unacceptability of the candidates in the race. As you may have noticed in the previous poll, people who voted for Ron Paul as their number one choice also only put Ron Paul as the only acceptable candidate — a voting behavior not mimicked by supporters of other candidates. This made the data severely flawed and useless as a barometer — even for an unscientific one.

We saw the same thing here at the ‘Grok when we had a poll back in June. Ron Paul won with 92% of the vote. And really, while I agree with some of what Paul stands for, and count many of his supporters among those who I respect and in some cases, admire, his real support is practically nil.

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Jeffrey Bubb

Please define “real” support.
And, why aren’t you omitting Sam Brownback, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo and Fred Thompson from you poll? They, too, spam online polls. Is there a reason you are only omitting Ron Paul?
http://gryffynz.asilgrif.org/blog Paul

He’s got some good ideas. He’s got some crappy ideas. The real problem is the inability of his supporters to act any older than 12. Oh that and the spam he kept sending me. Cause that’s really going to show me he runs a first class operation.
http://www.neoconplanet.com Randy

Ron Paul has two problems which are going to kill his candidacy.
One is his foreign policy, the other is the caliber of supporter he’s attracted. If he were to eschew the “truthers”, anti-Semites, et al, he might have a bit more credibility. However, Paul seems to come from the school of thought which states that any publicity is good publicity. Sorry L. Ron, it just ain’t so.