Conservative bloggers turn negative on Ron Paul
by WonkoKevin
They’re not ignoring him–yet–but conservative and liberal bloggers alike have turned negative on Ron Paul. It’s the same pattern as we saw in Wonkosphere with Mike Huckabee: positive on the personality and ideology, negative on the policies. So once specific policies start getting unearthed, bloggers attack. I also think that fans of the other candidates are negative on the votes that Paul is taking (and will continue to take) in the primaries. Who would Paul voters vote for if he weren’t in? I suppose Thompson’s federalism is as close to Paul’s libertarianism as any, but I think for the most part that these voters would otherwise be staying home.
The graph below shows the tone of posts about Paul over the past 14 days (conservative=red and liberal=blue). The grey band represents the mean (for that day) plus and minus one standard deviation, so if you’re below the band it means the tone is significantly negative. Further, our experience shows anything less than 0.10 is trouble. At this point, I think Paul is going to pull 5-10% in any primary he runs in. I don’t see it going up or down, regardless of blogger buzz to the contrary.
January 13th, 2008 at 7:42 am
[…] David Friedman wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThey’re not ignoring him–yet–but conservative and liberal bloggers alike have turned negative on Ron Paul. It’s the same pattern as we saw in Wonkosphere with Mike Huckabee: positive on the personality and ideology, negative on the … […]
January 13th, 2008 at 8:17 am
[…] David Friedman wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThey’re not ignoring him–yet–but conservative and liberal bloggers alike have turned negative on Ron Paul. It’s the same pattern as we saw in Wonkosphere with Mike Huckabee: positive on the personality and ideology, negative on the … […]