Straw Poll from WI 1st Congressional District Fall Fest

Man, it's a blast to win for Ron Paul. We just had a straw poll with Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter speaking at a dinner in Cheyenne. We won.

WHAT A BLAST!!!

Ron Paul 49
Thompson 25
Romney 15
Hunter 14

You guys smoked 'em...121/18. That's awesome. We need to pass around the good news because some of these posters on DailyPaul are downers.

We are winning! Freedom is popular, and the Constitution brings people together.

We were the only "presence" for a presidential candidate (well, one table did have about 10 "I'm with Fred" bumper stickers on a table with a bunch of other stuff... does that count for "presence"???)

Their absence is NOT really surprising as Wisconsin's primary has become insignificant this year (ours is on Feb 19th, and "Super-Duper-Tuesday" with 20 states is on Feb 5th) -- and the fact that NONE of the purportedly "frontrunner" candidates (Giuliani, McCain, Romney) have squat for organization in our state (why buy "Astroturf" in a non-early primary state?)

BTW, it was commented by many that they while they had seen several Ron Paul signs (and banners, etc) they had not seen ANY signs for the other candidates anywhere in our state.



Bad side
Was that the "guest speaker" seemed to be trying to get everyone in attendance to PRE-accept that the GOP Presidential candidate was going to be a "compromised conservative" -- i.e. Giuliani or Romney or McCain or Huckabee (ignoring Ron Paul... even though we had a big sign right in front of him, and another, bigger one right behind him!) -- and that they should vote for the party's "choice" anyway. (He used an analogy that if your house is burning, you send two sons out to get the neighbors, one is a fireman and the other you hate, well, if the fireman isn't home, you should accept help from you hate. I posited [privately] to several around me that the problem with his analogy is that you also have a third neighbor, and he's a pyromaniac -- aka Giuliani, et al -- who will brings gasoline and matches!) His main message was essentially that GOP platform needed to be a defensive "Anybody-But-Hilary" campaign. Really a pretty depressing speech from ANY perspective... I mean if that is the BEST you can come up with for an analogy and "campaign theme"... well how depressing is that? (Oh, also quite a bit of fear-mongering -- speaker is a radio Rush Limbo wannabe -- about "IslamoFascist" threats to us here... Like Osama REALLY wants to come and bomb our cows and cheese factories!)



Good side
Is that many WERE interested, and glad to see our turnout and that we were bringing "new blood" into the GOP. Others were willing to take lit and/or DVD's (I like giving the DVD's as you can't just "glance" at it and throw it away like a slim-jim, you gotta WATCH it first!)

We got a good response and "approval nods" from our new (young) state GOP chairman. Also got good responses from several of the area GOP chairpeople as well, and they were easy to approach -- we gave them our best DVD's (with the "New Hope" vid as the intro).

I think one reason for the lack of hostility here is that in Wisc, the GOP is fighting tooth and nail against our Dem Governor's own version of "Hilary-Care" and runaway deficit financing -- and the fact that many GOP Pres Candidates seem to semi-endorse such things makes them cringe a bit. (Also, our GOP took a big blow in last election cycle with scandals, and lost top men, etc., which caused a LOT of apathy and attrition. So they are really hurting for new blood.)

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I think there is an interesting social dynamic at play when non-allied citizens see a cool bunch of people with Ron Paul signs. The citizens vote for Ron Paul in a straw poll because of wanting "to be like" or "identify with" the cool strangers with the signs.

Ron Paul is the new hip.

bump (cause it got lost in all the hubub about the ad yesterday!)

BTW, I was there, attendance was somewhere around 150..200 (my own guesstimate).