Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Georgia support for Ron Paul

I've been watching the support for Ron Paul grow in Georgia and am curious to see where his support is concentrated, partly to understand where more attention needs to be put to help build his support to a necessary 23-25% among GOP primary voters. Since most of the GOP voting block resides in rural areas of the state I suspect those are the areas needing the most attention.

Since campaign contribution reports are one of the two most revealing sources to examine Paul's support across the state (local straw polls being the other), I periodically check the donor information collected at ronpaulgraphs.com here.

While the information at ronpaulgraphs.com is not nearly as authoritative as the official FEC reports released quarterly because it only captures a representative sample of less than half the actual current donors, ronpaulgraphs.com is more immediate and captures some of the under-$200 donors whose information is not included in the official reports. (You can see my Georgia donor maps created from quarterly FEC reports here and here).

The event that inspired this post is the astounding impact the campaign's recent fundraising email has had on Georgia's support. At approximately 1pm I glanced at the ronpaulgraphs.com donors to see that only 83 donors were reflected in the site's captured demographics, with only 1 of those being from Georgia (a donor from Atlanta). At 1:58 pm, the campaign sent out an official fundraising email request. At 3pm, the total number of donors' names collected at the site had jumped from 83 to 255.

And in just a little over an hour, the number of Georgians reflected in that data grew from 1 to 13, scattered across the state as follows:

Atlanta (2 different donors)
Norman Park
Rockmart
Savannah
Jonesboro
Kennesaw
Warner Robins
Bogart
Marietta
Roswell
Bonaire
Valdosta

Since ronpaulgraphs.com only collects a sampling of donors, this information reflects only about half of the actual donor activity taking place at the campaign site. We can reasonably assume that these 13 donors are accompanied by 13 others whose information wasn't collected, for a total of about 25-26 supporter responses in under an hour.

That is an impressive immediate response to an official campaign communication from Georgia's Ron Paul supporters from rural as well as the big population centers, and I just wanted to share it since I stumbled onto it accidentially. I'll check back in later this evening to see how much larger this response becomes.

--
Updated 4:30pm: We're now up to 394 donors captured, 28 of those from Georgia.
Atlanta (4 different donors)
Norman Park
Rockmart
Savannah
Jonesboro
Kennesaw (2)
Warner Robins
Bogart
Marietta (3)
Roswell
Bonaire
Valdosta
Fayetteville
Austell
Douglasville
McDonough
Hogansville
Cleveland
Alpharetta (2)
Ellijay
Mineral Bluff

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