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Whither Ron Paul?

If you judge by social networking sites, our next president will either be Barack Obama or Ron Paul. Obama, for instance, has 268,520 supporters on Facebook, while his closest Democratic competitor, Hillary Clinton, has 80,984. Paul has 77,308, more than 30,000 supporters ahead of his closest Republican contender, Mike Huckabee. (Paul's official SNS home is here on MOLI.)

Yet Paul consistently polls in the single digits and he has mostly scored in that range in actual primary votes. His best showing was a second-place win in Nevada, with 14 percent of the vote. To date, he has secured only six delegates to the nominating convention. To be sure, he's done better than Rudy Giuliani, but "America's mayor" has only been really running in Florida thus far.

Among Florida Facebookers supporting Republican candidates, Paul gets 34 percent, nine points ahead of Huckabee. In a recent Miami Herald poll, he garnered three percent. We'll see what happens on Jan. 29. I think in Florida he's got a shot at breaking into double digits, but he won't get anywhere near 34 percent.

What can account for this discrepancy? Is Paul's support base not primarily registered Republican voters? Are social networking types too busy writing blog screeds to actually go vote?

During a campaign stop in Miami before the primaries, I asked Ron Paul himself to speculate on his chances. He seemed as mystified by the whole thing as anyone else.

"I don't know," he admitted. "When you meet these people, the rallies are all big. It makes you think, 'Wow, we're on the verge of victory.' But I'm not naive either. The polls don't show us doing that well. Maybe none of these people are even on the Republican rolls, nor did they vote ever. Are they going to register? Are they going to vote? Too many unknowns for me to predict. All I know is there's a lot of enthusiasm for what we're doing."

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