Estimating Ron Paul's Support

Have you ever wondered how Ron Paul can raise $18.5 million dollars in one quarter and still be at 6% in the national polls? I have, and I decided to run some numbers. This IS NOT proof, but speculation. First let me present my statistical sources:

• The US Population is 301,139,947
• In 2004 655,792 individuals donated to one of the the top 10 candidates (derived from opensecrets.org)
• Ron Paul has 122,689 or more donors in the 4th quarter alone(ronpaul2008.com)

From this data we can derive that only 0.22% of the population gave to a presidential candidate in the last election. This means that, on average, each unique donor equates to about 459 members of the population of which less than 50% actually vote in the general election and only 8% vote in the primaries.

Based upon Ron Paul's 122,689 and growing number of donors we can infer that he has 56,338,786 supporters (122,689/0.0022). This represents 19% of the population of the United States.

If you consider that 50% of the population falls in the democratic party, this represents 38% of the republican party.

I am going to argue that the ratio between voter turnout and probability of giving will be equal for all candidates. As passion increases so does voter turn out and individual donations. To convince me otherwise, you would have make a really compelling case that Ron Paul supporters donate in much higher percentages than other candidates, but that it will not translate into an equal voter turn out advantage.

[update]
A reader was able to provide a compelling case that the ratio between turnout and donations is not constant. There are many poor individuals looking for government handouts that will turnout, but will not give. There may be a great number of lackluster supporters for the other candidates who are willing to vote but not willing to spend their money. Plus with free media coverage other people may not feel the NEED to donate to their candidate even if they strongly support them.

This fly's in the face of the fact that in the republican primaries NONE OF THE ABOVE is the winner as most republicans are very unhappy with their choices.

So there you have it, Ron Paul may sweep the republican nomination with 38% and then take the white house with 60%+ of the total vote.

[update 0]
Several readers have argued that Ron Paul does not have the name recognition that some of the others have and that Ron Paul supporters donate in much higher percentages. Lets assume that Ron Paul supporters are 5 times as likely to donate to their candidate than supporters of other candidates. That would put Ron Paul at around 9-10% in the republican polls. Now if Ron Paul supporters have 50% turn out compared to an average of 8% turn out for everyone else then he still gets 38% of the primary votes!

Other readers point out that there is no way that 19% of the population supports Ron Paul. I would like to remind them that 92% of them do not actually vote in the primaries. This means that only 1.4% of the population needs to know enough about Ron Paul to go out and vote. Or one out of every 72 people.

Still others claim that if you apply this logic for other candidates then you would end up with more than 100% of the population, but this is mostly a failure to do math on their part; however, there is some legitimate argument here. I am taking Ron Paul's support as a percentage of ALL donators to ALL candidates from ALL of 2004. Because the other candidates do not post day-by-day updates on the number of donors they have I cannot compare Ron Paul directly with other candidates this season; however, once Q4 results are published I can do a direct comparison. So for my numbers to be wrong and add up to over 100% of the total US population then the other candidates would have to be receiving donations from TWICE as many people as they have in the past. Not likely.

Apparently Obama has received a TON of individual donations this season, so comparing to 2004 may be completely bogus. We also know that Obama has inflated his donor list by selling merchandise directly. Fortunately, Ron Paul isn't running against Obama for the republican nomination. I will not deny that Obama has a ton of "popular" support, he is in 2nd place on digg/elections.

What's creating the fuss is the simple fact is that the senator from Illinois is growing his supporter list in a nontraditional way. People who buy Obama campaign hats, buttons and bumper stickers are all being counted as part of that record-breaking number of contributors.

At least four other presidential candidates do the same thing, John McCain, Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, and Dennis Kucinich. Unlike most of his opponents, Obama sells his campaign merchandise directly, instead of outsourcing it. The people who have bought campaign merchandise only count for about 1 percent of all the donors who have given Obama money

If this is a trend then it means that total donors for all candidates will be far greater in 2008 than in 2004 and so the percentages will be off.

[update 1]
The election statistics from 2004 include donors for the ENTIRE race, this means that Ron Paul's numbers are probably much better than these calculations show. If we assume that half of the donations occurred AFTER the primaries then he is on track to gain 37% nation or 74% of the republicans. Now I don't believe that he will get this kind of response, but it still shows that my initial calculations were conservative.

[update 2]
For an idea of how Ron Paul's support is spread around the country check out this map thanks to ronpaulgraphs.com.

When you consider the electoral college map and count only the states that are more green than brown (such as CA, TX, and FL) you end up with 223 electoral college votes.