fundraising

At about this time every three months, we have to endure the typical quarterly fundraising roundups. This one from The Hill shows the problem with the genre, headlined "FEC reports show Crist the man to beat in Florida." This in response to Crist raising an eye-popping $4.3 million in the 2nd quarter, against Marco Rubio's $340,000.

Crist may be a slight favorite in the Republican primary, but money will have nothing to do with why.

I bang this drum pretty often, but ask presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney how far early, high dollar bundler support got them. Or Virginia Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe on how much a 10-to-1 cash advantage is worth.

Underfunded candidates like Rubio don't need more money now. The need an argument. A bulletproof argument from a plausible candidate is worth tens of millions of dollars in any primary, overwhelming a financial advantage of any magnitude. While frontrunners confuse high-dollar fundraising for actual grassroots support, a conclusion that headlines like The Hill's do nothing to discourage, smart underdogs would do right to focus on building an impregnable message advantage. Because that's the part that counts for 90% in any electoral victory.

John McCain's campaign was defunct and broke at this point in the race, without money to pay a pollster. Mike Huckabee had no money. Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani spent $60 million plus to win a single delegate, attending fundraisers when he should have been in New Hampshire. A leading Republican strategist recently told me that he wonders whether money doesn't wind up making our campaigns worse while the lack of money makes them better and more focused. Look at McCain with no money, vs. McCain with money (pre-implosion and general election).

Crist's fundraising aside, he's still a relatively popular governor with 100% name ID, and so still the "man to beat." But fundraising trophies don't make it so. Complacency is his biggest enemy.

Crist's campaign is the antithesis of Rebuildness. Of Crist's $4.3 million how much was online? How much came from donations of $100 or less? How many people have signed up on his e-mail list since he announced? How many of his supporters would crawl on glass to see him win?

In running a campaign, that latter kind of support is the kind I want, and I think Rubio has it.

And not only that, but he's a particularly strong and plausible kind of grassroots candidate. He's no Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul. Had Crist not stepped in, he'd be considered a top recruit and a rising star. Rubio would easily beat Kendrick Meek in a general election.

We have two uniquely talented people running for Senate in a seat we will probably hold in Florida. Instead of elbowing one aside, we should be grabbing the popcorn and watching this one go the distance.

The primary will be close. Among voters who know both, Crist and Rubio are tied. Crist's money will not buy him more name ID or goodwill; only his bully pulpit as Governor can do that, and he's surrendering it. Meanwhile, Rubio's talents as a candidate, his crossover potential, and his appeal to grassroots conservatives mean he has nowhere to go but up. I still think Crist narrowly wins absent a massive screwup, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Recent elections have not been kind to moneyed "frontrunners."

What  started this morning at the Washington Times has become a huge local story for Chris Dodd.

Joseph Cassano, the "Patient Zero" of the global financial meltdown, supposedly demanded huge contributions from AIG employees to fund Senator Chris Dodd's campaigns.

 According an email obtained by the Times, Cassano urged executives at American International Group's Wilton-based Financial Products division to donate to Dodd in Nov., 2006, as he was poised to assume the chairmanship of the critical Senate banking committee."As he considers running for president in 2008, Senator Dodd has asked us for our support with his re-election campaign and we have offered to be supportive," stated the email quoted by the Times. 

The executives were reportedly asked to write checks for $2,100 from themselves and their spouses, and to send them to Mr. Dodd's campaign. The Times said the executives were, in turn, supposed to pass the message down the line to senior members of their management teams. 

This leads cynical old me to wonder if AIG reimbursed their executives for these large donations. Perhaps, among Mr. Cassano's other talents, he was running a successful money laundry from his Wilton, CT offices.

This all seems very reminscent of the hi jinks that sent Randy Cunningham to jail.  

Maybe Mr. Cassano might want to do some singing--and not for Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul.  Seems he's being investigated for fraud in bankrupting AIG. 

Right now Joey is hiding out at his London mansion. But I suspect the UK authorities will be happy to send us something a bit more valuable than useless DVD's....perhaps a witness in custody?

Were this to happen, the details of what Dodd offered Cassano for the nearly $200,000 in campaign funds might make for, hmm, entertaining reading.

What  started this morning at the Washington Times has become a huge local story for Chris Dodd.

Joseph Cassano, the "Patient Zero" of the global financial meltdown, supposedly demanded huge contributions from AIG employees to fund Senator Chris Dodd's campaigns.

 According an email obtained by the Times, Cassano urged executives at American International Group's Wilton-based Financial Products division to donate to Dodd in Nov., 2006, as he was poised to assume the chairmanship of the critical Senate banking committee."As he considers running for president in 2008, Senator Dodd has asked us for our support with his re-election campaign and we have offered to be supportive," stated the email quoted by the Times. 

The executives were reportedly asked to write checks for $2,100 from themselves and their spouses, and to send them to Mr. Dodd's campaign. The Times said the executives were, in turn, supposed to pass the message down the line to senior members of their management teams. 

This leads cynical old me to wonder if AIG reimbursed their executives for these large donations. Perhaps, among Mr. Cassano's other talents, he was running a successful money laundry from his Wilton, CT offices.

This all seems very reminscent of the hi jinks that sent Randy Cunningham to jail.  

Maybe Mr. Cassano might want to do some singing--and not for Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul.  Seems he's being investigated for fraud in bankrupting AIG. 

Right now Joey is hiding out at his London mansion. But I suspect the UK authorities will be happy to send us something a bit more valuable than useless DVD's....perhaps a witness in custody?

Were this to happen, the details of what Dodd offered Cassano for the nearly $200,000 in campaign funds might make for, hmm, entertaining reading.

On Friday morning, Fred Thompson sent out an e-mail to his 2008 presidential list through his PAC telling people to go directly to donate to Jim Tedisco.

Our fundraising total for the now 80K for NY-20 campaign stood at around $28,000 when the e-mail went out. Since then, over $23,000 has come in, bringing the public total to over $51,000 at this writing. It's prudent to assume that about $20,000 of this came in through Fred's e-mail list.

This is a very smart use of a PAC's list that too few Republicans leadership PAC take up. Effectively, Thompson has maxed out x4 to Tedisco's campaign, not by circumventing the legal $5,000 limit on PAC contributions, but by directing his donors to give directly to Tedisco.

Every cycle, the Congressional committees lean on their members to write checks to the committees and targeted races. And PACs are pressed to write $5,000 checks. That's the Old Way. The New Way is to aggregate contributions over and above the $5,000 from your supporters, $25 or $50 at a time, thus amplifying your influence. To anyone whose responsible for generating more money from PAC and campaign committees, have you considered allowing these PACs to count indirect contributions from grassroots donors toward their goals -- a far more leveragable source of resources for battleground Republican campaigns?

If you ran in 2008, don't just send Tedisco a $5,000 check. Help him find 500 -- or 5,000 -- new donors from your campaign e-mail list. Fred has shown the way here. Who will follow?

Disclosure: My company designed the Tedisco fundraising widget and is helping the campaign with online fundraising.

This is reposted from the GOP Tech Summit on Ning. The RNC will be collecting ideas for online activism and its broader implications (my focus here) through the end of the week -- and this is your chance to get your two cents in.  

Traditional campaigns usually unfold in this order:

1. Raise money and stockpile resources so that you can afford to get your message out.
2. Spend the money to get your message out and gather support, usually through expensive mediums like TV, radio, or mail.

Barack Obama flipped this model in 2008. Yes, he was able to raise impressive sums early on from bundlers like David Geffen and Penny Pritzker. Considering how the campaign unfolded, this round of funding can be likened to angel investors in a startup: they give enough to buy the pencils and fund operations for a few months, but the company is ultimately expected to sink or swim of its own weight by selling direct to the consumer.

In this case, selling direct to the consumer meant money and volunteer hours, not just votes. Fundraising was not the province of a few bundlers or a few closely guarded lists or of a few direct mail tricks, but of an innovative campaign that fused fundraising, volunteer activity, and vote-getting.

This is what a typical McCain fundraiser in the last campaign looked like:

And this is what a typical Obama fundraiser looked like:

If you're telling yourself that was primarily a rally, not a fundraiser, you're right. The difference is that 1) the event in question was held on February 23, 2007 -- two years ago Monday -- on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, not exactly when we're used to seeking big rallies and not exactly Iowa or New Hampshire. And 2) to get in to the event, each person had to register for tickets online. Getting someone's e-mail address is like raising $10 or $15, and in Obama's case, probably more like $35 or $40. The 20,000 people at that event probably donated $1,000,000 collectively to Obama -- and the cost of acquisition was nearly zero -- more than all but the most successful rubber chicken Republican fundraisers.

In this way, the traditional model was turned upside down: for the most part, Obama gathered political support and only then did he really kick the fundraising into high gear. This is different -- in a messier and unpredictable way, but also in a more lucrative way -- than stockpiling resources to meet a budget and shifting the focus late in the game from fundraising to grassroots. Cashflow issues aside though, I doubt that the Obama people minded much when the money came in.

The lesson here is that fundraising is not an independent variable. Fundraising is a dependent variable and the independent variable is the message. There does not exist an innate ability to fundraise independent of a strong message -- unless the candidate is fabulously wealthy and can self-fund. And in cases where there might be, all the fundraising in the world cannot overcome a poor message. If a candidate is wealthy or has rich friends, but has no message, the GOP should run -- not walk -- away from that candidate.

This is directly relevant to the RNC -- and all our campaign committees -- because they will often seek out self-funders with the thought that it might relieve the financial burden on the committee and allow it to invest in races where more help is needed. Political consultants often tend to favor this type of candidate -- because they pay. This is all well and good, if the candidate is a good candidate with a strong message, but if not, we're in trouble. And if a race really matters, the RNC or any other committee will probably pour in resources regardless. Paid media is not very leverageable and even $10 million can go to waste quickly if the force multiplier that is the message is zero.

Beyond a focus on self-funders, the all-consuming focus on early high-dollar fundraising is a direct threat to those of us who would like to a see a pervasive grassroots focus throughout the entire campaign. Hundreds of man hours are spent putting together an individual event, by which time the $2,400 check collected at the door nets you $1,500. Hours a day of the candidate's time are spent on the phone with big donors, and then we wonder why candidates are seen as insiders who can't connect with the grassroots. There is no doubt that this model can raise a lot of money. But not enough. Barack Obama shows that the alternative to this can not only raise enough money to compete -- it can utterly destroy the 100 city, $2,400-a-plate tour. Ask Hillary Clinton what it feels like to be the candidate of big donors.

The big donor, big bundler model worked in 2000 and was on its last legs in 2004, but we must now confront the reality that it just doesn't scale very well. It's important that we lay down a clear marker for future campaigns, and institutionalize this at the RNC: finding a creative way to collect 100,000 online petition signatures is now more important than the New York City finance event. I'm sorry, but it just is. It should require more executive level focus. It's more efficient and it scales better and it allows you to do everything you need to do in one fell swoop: get donors and activists all at the same time.

Are we clear on the role of the RNC Chairman or does it need to be better defined? 

As a co-founder of Rebuild the Party, I’m staying neutral in the RNC Chairman race (at least for now); yet, I’m heavily invested in the process and ensuring we elect the best man for the job. 

I’m encouraged that the race for Chairman, hopefully in small part due to our efforts at Rebuild, has morphed into a more open process.  For a job as important as RNC Chairman, candidates should endure at least as stringent a job interview process as candidates for office.  In years when our Party holds the White House, we don’t have such a luxury.  In years when we get crushed, like we have the last two cycles, we do have that luxury.

Our Party is in crisis.  Let’s resort back to our Crisis Management 101 books.  Crisis is defined as a “turning point” and “danger and opportunity.”  At this turning point, we have a tremendous opportunity to leverage our best talent to revive the Party. 

RNC voting members have power, this time around, to choose who our fearless leader will be.  We all have an opportunity to use our voices, and any communication tool at our disposal, to influence the choice of the voting members.

The process for picking an RNC Chairman is crucial.  If we can agree that the RNC Chairman’s race is a job interview, then we should have a specific job description, at least as it fits each cycle, understanding that the job of Chairman with a Republican president differs from the job when there is not.  From what I can see, the only official job description of the RNC Chairman is “CEO” of the Republican National Committee.

Similar to the Vice Presidency, the RNC Chairman’s role is amorphous, so I seek to define it for the upcoming term:

1. Director of Operations at the Republican National Committee, providing guidance and leadership on message, fundraising and political strategy for the Republican Party.

2. Chief messenger of the Party, communicating the Party’s positions, ideas and opinions on current events through all media.

3. Chief fundraiser of the Party, making themselves available to headline Republican events across the country to raise money for the RNC and local Party organizations.

4. Director of Party Relationships, building and maintaining strong relationships with State Party leaders, allied 3rd party groups, issue groups, demographic groups and niche “wing of the party” groups.

What is not included in the job description as Kathryn Jean Lopez touches on (and I’ve been musing about):

1. Chief Policy Advisor for the Republican Party

2. Chief Agenda Setter for the Republican Party

This is not to say that showing leadership on issues, and robust knowledge on tax, energy, health care, and [name that issue] policy, is not a plus.  It is.  But I think we need to take care to frame the RNC Chairman’s job for what it should be, unless I’m totally off base and we expect a Chairman to be what we want in a 2012 presidential candidate.

I’m interested in your thoughts.  

Today, the final fundraising numbers of the 2008 election cycle were released, showing Barack Obama climbing to a staggering $750 million haul for the election season. Obama's spending in the general election was $300 million to McCain's $84 million in public funding. Obama outspent McCain by $135 million to $26.5 million in the final two weeks of the campaign.

Several prominent conservatives have sought to minimize the significance of Obama's accomplishment, pointing to this Campaign Finance Institute study showing that Obama's mix of small and high dollar donations was roughly similar to President Bush's in 2004, or pointing to the Obama campaign's poor protections against online credit card fraud.

All of these rationalizations miss the point. Saying that the Obama campaign's fundraising is not noteworthy except for its scale is like saying Mount Everest is not noteworthy except for its height. Online fundraising empowers small donors -- but it also reduces the transaction costs for big donors and enables more people to join the ranks of large and medium donors through multiple donations throughout the course of the election season. Obama's fundraising marked a categorical shift, not so much in empowering small donors, but in building an infinitely scalable campaign that could be dialed up to virtually any level Obama wanted.

I am bewildered that some people try to make the arguments that they do. The Campaign Finance Institute argues that, "[i]t turns out that Barack Obama's donors may not have been quite as different as we had thought."

Ummm. Except that there were 3.1m of them. And that's not a trivial difference. But it doesn't stop there.

CFI notes that there was a significant difference in people who started out small and moved into a larger donor group:

Many of the repeat donors who started off small ended up in the $201-$999 middle range. Among Obama's total pool of 403,000 disclosed donors on August 31, more than half (about 212,000) started off by giving undisclosed contributions of $200 or less. About 93,000 of these repeaters gave in cumulative amounts of no more than $400 for the full primary season. Another 106,000 repeaters ended up between $401 and $999. By comparison, Clinton and McCain each had about 100,000 donors in the entire $201-$999 middle range, and for them the number included both repeaters and one-time givers.

So what we found here is not only that there were more donors, but the Obama campaign did a better job of converting their one-time donors into repeated donors. Oh, and, by the way, they did a better job of turning thier interested observers (12 million on the mailing list) into donors (1/4 donated)

So it wasn't just a difference in mass -- although that's significant enough -- but in process.

This weekend, I heard a presentation from a Republican operative and strategist who claimed that to be competitive in the 2012 Presidential race, the GOP candidate will need to raise $1 billion. I suspect that that number is a touch high, but it is not an unreasonable assumption. Let's run some numbers on that.

If you assume that the donors all came from maxed out donors and that the new limit is $2,500, that would mean that the candidate would need to find 200,000 donors. More likely, the average donation size would be much smaller and the number of donors much larger. Barack Obama had over 3.1 million donors by October, averaging about $200/donor.

Consultants, who get paid by campaigns, tend to focus on the dollars. But that's not what we should be focusing on when we look at the Obama campaign. We should be looking at the numbers of bodies. It is the size and scope of Obama's grassroots organization that is really the phenomonal innovation that could transform our politics. That, not the money, is what we need to figure out how to match.

Let's put it slightly differently. Obama got about 3m donors. He got about 6m cell phone numbers. And about 10m on his email list. Turning that around, about 1 in 3 of the people who signed up to his email list gave him money. That's earth-shattering.

I wrote a piece for Pajama's Media on technology in the 2008 race. The key point about the campaign was its decision to put the organizational focus on its grassroots:

In the end, the Obama campaign’s various technologies for fundraising, GOTV, and communications were side shows. They all derived from a much more fundamental innovation. Rolling Stone described the most important insight of the Obama campaign from one of their trainers: “We decided that we didn’t want to train volunteers. We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves.”...

You can make the fundraisers a little more efficient. You can make the GOTV more efficient. You can have a better message and get it out better. These are linear improvements. But political organizations grow exponentially when you improve the organizers. That’s what the Obama campaign did. Everything was focused on making the organizer better.

In the end, either Obama's organization will be a one-off, which I wouldn't count on, or conservatives and/or Republicans are going to have to learn to match that level of organizing. But just as Obama's organization has partially transformed the Democratic Party and Dean's organization definititely did, the Republican Party will probably be transformed by a shift to a focus on grassroots. Some thoughts on how:

1. The power of the donor class will be signficantly reduced as it shifts to the grassroots.
2. This party would likely involve an overthrow of the current party leadership. And I don't necessarily mean at the RNC, but down at the county party level.
3. A party with that level of grassroots activity and energy might be more ideologically broadly-based than our current party.

That would be a fundamentally different Republican Party, and one that is focused on the voters and the activists and the donors rather than the intrigue of Washington, which has been so much the focus of the party.

The third point about a somewhat different ideological composition could be important, and the Republican primary might even provide a guide. John McCain won his primary based on winning rank-and-file Republicans who were not part of the party apparatus. He campaigned to these people. In March of 2007, I was in New Hampshire on the Straight Talk Express, and McCain was speaking at veterans halls to whoever would come. Mitt Romney was speaking that same day to Lincoln Day dinners. McCain probably wasn't even invited to those dinners.

At the same time, at some state and local conventions the local parties only maintained control under the attack by Ron Paul supporters by cheating them out of their delegate spots. A more vibrant party could have handled -- and perhaps beaten -- new entrants into the process. A more vibrant party could have built a coalition with those people rather than driven them away. Healthy political parties add people because they help them win. Unhealthy ones drive people away.

So in the end, I am somewhat bored with an ideological debate about the future of the party. The real change will be if people are willing to empower a new grassroots of this party and give up power to it. If we don't it's over. If we do, there could be tremendous opportunities that start to address some of the weaknesses of our party.

Crossposted at NextGenGOP.com.

A few hours ago, I received an e-mail from a Ron Paul supporter, and although the majority of the e-mail was rather condescending, the author makes an important statement that I do believe merits exploration:

You guys [at NextGenGOP] are … ignoring Ron Paul … and his contribution to gathering sincere and dedicated enthusiasm in American politics.

Indeed, the author is correct – our contributors have not really discussed the Ron Paul Revolution, despite the fact that there are a number of crucial lessons for the Republican Party to learn from his successes. Thus, without further ado, I will take this post to thoroughly explore this matter.

To his credit, Ron Paul’s campaign demonstrated that Republicans can indeed keep up with Democrats in the era of Web 2.0, particularly in the areas of grassroots organization and fundraising. In addition, his campaign won the hearts of many young voters in a way quite similar to that of President-elect Obama. This begs two critical questions: how did Ron Paul manage to accomplish these significant feats despite being widely regarded as a “fringe candidate,” and more importantly, what lessons must the Republican Party take from his success?

Ron Paul’s Successes

Let us begin by looking at the many successes of the Paul campaign, and how his performance compares to that of the two most significant candidates of the cycle: John McCain and Barack Obama.

1. Ron Paul energized his supporters, resulting in an incredible outpouring of enthusiasm for his candidacy despite being supported by an extremely small percentage of voters. McCain’s campaign created a short burst of energy during his selection of Sarah Palin and the convention, but it proceeded to fizzle out as time passed. Obama’s campaign continuously energized its supporters, resulting in unbelievably massive crowds at his campaign events. A Gallup poll from October 2008 confirms this phenomenon, clearly indicating the enthusiasm gap that Democrats had over Republicans.
2. Ron Paul effectively used the Internet to organize his grassroots efforts. Relying on existing infrastructures like Meetup.com – where he was able to recruit over 86,600 members in 1,150 groups that planned and held over 51,000 offline campaign events – the Paul campaign had enormous success in this arena. McCain’s website had its own network called McCainSpace, but at many levels it was not especially groundbreaking, and in contrast to the online outreach by Obama and Paul, it seemed to be used fairly lightly by supporters. In contrast, Barack Obama successfully built an incredible network at my.barackobama.com by bringing on Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Ask almost any Obama supporter, and they’ll tell you that they used Obama’s online tools in one way or another. What’s unique about Ron Paul’s success, however, is that his campaign didn’t spend enormous resources building its own tools. Instead, it successfully took advantage of tools that already existed and thus was able to build an incredibly comprehensive national grassroots network without having to spend a significant amount of its own money.
3. Ron Paul’s ability to raise funds online is unparalleled in the Republican Party. Indeed, for the final quarter of 2007, Ron Paul outraised all of the other Republican Presidential candidates. McCain’s fundraising was generally unexceptional, and his strategic error in choosing to take public funding will almost certainly never happen again. And of course, we all know that Obama was a fundraising juggernaut, particularly online.
4. Ron Paul strongly appealed to young voters. Exit polls for early primary states like NH, MI, SC, and FL show that a disproportionately large percentage of younger voters pulled the lever for Ron Paul (in many cases, roughly twice the percentage of votes he received from other age groups). As we know from the exit polling of the general election, these young voters overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama over John McCain: CNN pegs Obama’s advantage at 66% - 32%.

How Ron Paul’s Successes Came to Fruition

At the most basic level, it was Ron Paul’s common-sense and decidedly libertarian platform that created so much interest in his campaign. While some of his positions, such as his staunch opposition to the Iraq war, stand in stark contrast to the Republican agenda, the fact is that the core of his message is quite in line with the traditional Republican message: reducing the federal government’s size and cutting its spending.

What made Ron Paul distinct, however, was his passion and commitment to accomplishing this. If you had to identify the single most important policy issue in a hypothetical Paul administration, it would unquestionably be reduction of government. Unfortunately, you cannot unequivocally say the same about any of the other Republican candidates, and certainly not of John McCain (read: McCain-Feingold, among other things).

Ron Paul’s steadfast and unwavering commitment to his limited government principles brought a huge influx of dedicated supporters to his campaign. The resulting enthusiasm among these supporters translated into impeccable successes.

Lessons for the Republican Party

1. Democrats aren’t the only ones who can fully take advantage of the Internet, both in donations and in building a grassroots organization. Indeed, you don’t even necessarily need to build new tools to win the battle online. That said, in order to see Ron Paul-like success, there are two crucial components that must exist. First, you must have enthusiastic supporters who are not only willing but excited to help the organization. Second, you must be willing to allow online tools to step into areas that have traditionally been controlled internally, such as grassroots organization.
2. We cannot underestimate the importance of our ideals of smaller, less expensive government – and our candidates’ commitment to these ideals. To paraphrase a McCain stump line, Republicans were elected due to their promises to change Washington, but instead they let Washington change them. As a result, the voters turned to Democrats in 2006 and 2008, at least in part because they simply don’t trust us to keep our word. In 2010 and beyond, we need to run candidates who have a proven commitment to these principles – perhaps signing off on a Contract with America 2.0 similar to what I’ve previously suggested – and in doing so we will generate an incredible amount of enthusiasm for our candidates.
3. Successfully using the Internet saves money. A lot of money. Of the major Presidential candidates, Ron Paul’s campaign devoted by far the smallest percentage of its budget to paying staffers. One of the most important reasons for this is simple: by successfully using the Internet to build the grassroots backbone of the campaign, there was considerably less need to pay staffers to organize outreach efforts. Yes, the sheer notion of such a decentralized campaign may be unsettling to those who are used to running traditional campaigns. However, Web 2.0 is shaking up the foundations of many traditional infrastructures with resounding success. If we want to survive in this new era, we need to allow it to shake up our organizations, too. Just imagine if John McCain had been able to slash his campaign’s payrolls by just 15% due to such decentralization – in fiscal year 2007 alone (well before McCain was the presumptive nominee), McCain would have been able to save $2.3 million.
4. Republicans can win back the younger voting bloc. My experience has been that the vast majority of my peers – voters age 18-29 – fundamentally agree that they want the government in their lives as little as possible. The Republican Party is the party of individual freedoms and liberties, and if we can manage to resecure the public’s faith in this, we can win back young voters.

The bottom line is that we simply cannot afford to discount Ron Paul as a “fringe candidate” whose successes hold no lessons of value for the Republican Party. Instead, we must to adapt these successes into the new Republican Party. Viva la revolución!