Ron Paul's supporters have provided a measure of radical transparency into his fundraising that would make most political operatives suffer heart failure. Going well beyond the now-passe end-of-quarter fundraising "bat," the Paul campaign has set a public goal of $12 million raised for the quarter, posting their current total live on the homepage and including the names and hometowns of donors. If a donation comes in while you're on the site, you'll see it update live.
As if this weren't bold enough, RonPaulGraphs.com has taken it a step further. Using the live data feed that powers the graphic, the site publishes an impressive array of analytics including a minute-by-minute view of donations and projected totals for the month and quarter.
But that's not all.
The script also captures the name and hometown information for most online donors. A quick analysis of this data gives us the most revealing look yet at who Ron Paul's donors actually are.
First off, I took the state-by-state breakdown of donors and plugged into an Excel sheet, using it to produce donor-per-capita numbers for each state. Using this data, I created this map.
This really is a Western movement, with some of the Northeast thrown in. Basically, these are the places where you would expect libertarians to be strong. But I don't think I've ever seen a data set this good about the state-by-state strength of libertarianism. And the data gets more reliable every day .
The Paul movement is weakest in the Deep South and the Ohio River Valley. Ohio (and surprisingly New York) are Paul's weakest big states.
The differences are also fairly dramatic. One is 4 times more likely to be a Ron Paul donor in Nevada than in Mississippi. And more than twice as likely in blue Washington state than in blue New York. Alaska and Hawaii, which are not on the map, would also be colored the darkest shade of red.
The state-by-state numbers I crunched are in this spreadsheet (current as of about 24 hours ago).
Oh, and by the way, on the names...
Though not exhaustive, I did go through the last 200 names. A whopping 83% of donors were men, 14.5% were women, and 2.5% I couldn't determine from the name. Readers should comb through this list to confirm these numbers.
Comments
Wow
That is crazy unprecedented transparency. You're right to call out the public target for the quarter -- a bold move for sure.
Perhaps I'm really underestimating their potential. I just don't see how they can do it in the 4th quarter denouement.
It's a big experiment
Does the act of publishing your goal and being extremely transparent about it boost fundraising so dramatically that you can leapfrog the frontrunners? This has never been tried before at the presidential level, and it will tell us a lot we didn't know on 12/31.
Conventional wisdom would point to $5-6M as the max Ron Paul can do in a quarter. "Movement" candidacies generally peak after 2 or 3 quarters (look at Dean and Obama). They're also barely making half the pace, though I certainly expect that will pick up.
If they make it, the main reason will be because of transparency.
They didn't do this kind of stuff in Q2 and they wound up raising $2.4M rather than $4-5M. They did it in Q3 and upped their take to $5M. Now they're upping the ante even further.
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