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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.
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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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