Iowa: Voter to Donor Ratio – 8 : 1

The number of people who voted for Ron Paul in Iowa is approximately 8 times greater than the number of Iowans who donated to who campaign. I’ll explain how I arrived at this figure and what, if anything, this tells us for the rest of the primary season.

Firstly: the numbers.
All the data I’m going by was found at www.ronpaulgraphs.com. I wish to caution you that some of the data used are estimates and not exact figures.
The website keeps track of how many people donated and where those donors are from. However, the way it ‘captures’ these donors is through the widget that feeds donation data from the campaign sites across the web. Not all donor names are sent and in times of high donation volume, lots of names are missed. Nonetheless, when a name is sent, it is added to the ronpaulgraphs.com database. If it is a duplicate name + city and state then the name is not added. Currently the database lists nearly 69,000 names from all 50 states + DC. The website estimates the ACTUAL number of unique donors, however was about 163,000. Hence, if we assume a uniform distribution of missed versus ‘captured’ names in all states, we mean that we can multiply the listed number of donors per state by the ratio of estimated actual unique donors vs captured donor names- 163,000 / 69,000 = 2.36

On to Iowa:
On the website it lists that the number of captured donor names from Iowa was 673. If we multiply that by 2.36 we get 1588 donors from Iowa.
Ron Paul has 11,600 votes with 95% precincts reporting, so when it’s all reported he should have around 12,400 votes.
So that makes the ratio between number of votes and number of donors about 8 : 1

Implications:
Unfortunately, applying this ratio to other states to try to gauge how well Ron Paul might fair is a little tricky. For one, some states have a much higher donor to population ratio than others. Iowa, for example, has an average donor per population ratio of about 531 donors per million people. New Hampshire has the highest at 1227 donors / million people and Mississippi has the lowest with 264. (Note, these are ‘corrected’ values from www.ronpaulgraphs.com corrected by multiplying by 2.36) This means that if we don’t correct for the ‘enthusiasm/generosity’ level of the states, the results will be meaningless. If we just multiplied the donor numbers by 8 for every state, in New Hampshire, for example, we’d get 13,000 votes, which would have been good enough for 5% in the 2000 primaries. But if we did it in Alaska, Ron Paul would get 9,300 votes, which is over twice the entire voter turnout for the GOP in Alaska in 2000. While ‘Ron Paul Wins Alaska with 200%’ would be a great headline, it’s not realistic.
I’m not smart enough to come up with a reasonable way in which to predict the other states based on this one result, but you guys are free to. Maybe when New Hampshire is done it will be a good indicator of how to approach the high-donor states.