I've said from the beginning that you can't count Paul out completely, in the end he has almost no chance but he has as much of a chance as the others on the lower end of the ladder. Paul's popularity simply shows the disdain towards the Republican party, most of which is coming from the left but also from within the Republican party itself. It's no secret that Bush's approval ratings are very low, all of which can be attributed to the Iraq war. The Democrats look high and mighty at this moment, to some, but in the end it will be as tight a race as it was in 2004. There's no shoe ins, no easy answer, next year will be full of lots of surprises.
Out of the $5 million that Paul raised, about 70% of that came from web donations. These aren't solid numbers but TownHall.com is reporting they are pretty close to being absolute. It's no surprise to me, Ron Paul is a huge hit on the Internet and continues to be. According to TechPresident, Paul is very popular on social networking sites as well.
TechPresident shows Paul as having over 66,000 Myspace friends, that's third overall, under Obama and Clinton.
As far as Facebook goes, Paul racks in over 28,000 friends, under Obama and Clinton once again.
Ron Paul leads YouTube with about 4.3 million views a day.
Technorati, which tracks blogs, has Paul being mentioned in over 1,000 times a day, that's second behind Hillary.
Eventful is a site used to 'demand' any given person to come to your specific area. Paul has over 28,000 demands, second to Obama.
Lastly we have the actually campaign websites traffic. Even though Thompson had a good bounce, he sits slightly under Ron Paul at the moment. Huckabee also seems to be doing rather well in all these stats, go Huckabee!
So, what do all these numbers mean? All they really means is that Paul has the Internet buzz on his side. The Internet is a great, mostly free, source of advertisement. The only problem that is produced is the lack of real action off the computer. You can push your message online as much as you want but it has to extend beyond that. If Paul can utilize his massive following offline like he does online, which seems to be the case if you ever watch a debate, he will present a challenge to the other Republican candidates. Sure, as a conservative I'm supposed to be a-typical and write him off but I'm not willing to do that just yet. Even though he likes to call people like me a 'neocon' I'll hold my breath before announcing any losers, other than Hillary.