How Real Is The Hype About Ron Paul?

He's been called the Howard Dean of 2008 and there is a lot of hype about Ron Paul's Internet supporters being a force to be reckoned with. But I have to wonder, how real is the hype?

Recently, blogger Anonymous Liberal argued that Ron Paul is not the HD of '08, stating that Dean was a relatively mainstream Democrat, whose popularity with the party's base was proved by his subsequent appointment as DNC chairman, where as Paul is basically a Libertarian posing in an ill fitting GOP suit.

Over on Blog Catalog we have a small but very vocal contingent of Ron Paul supporters, always prepared to spin their candidate in the best possible light. Stoneman suggested some research is in order to answer the question of how real the hype is.

Nothing substantiates buzz like cold hard cash, and according to Open Secrets.org Ron Paul comes up short, ranking 5th among Republican presidential candidates in 3rd Quarter fundraising, with a Q3 total of 5.2 million vs 18 million for Romney, 12 million for Thompson, 11 million for Giuilani and 5.7 million for McCain. In total fundraising the order shakes out a little differently but with Ron Paul still in fifth place-- Romney 62 million, Giuliani 47 million, McCain 32 million, Thompson 12 million and Ron Paul 8 million. (And all of these numbers pale next to the 90 million and 80 million raised by Hillary and Obama respectively.)

Money is important, but it isn't everything, so I also decided to take a look at what kind of buzz the candidates are making in the blogosphere. For this, I turned to Nielsen Media's Blogpulse which provides a measurement of the percentage of All blog posts that mention a particular candidate. This is a Very fuzzy metric, imho since without exhaustive and painstaking analysis there is no way to differentiate from posts that may have mentioned a candidate in passing and posts that are actually About that candidate. Also note that these numbers are Very low because they are a percentage of All blog posts, including the many, many, many blogs that have nothing to do with politics. With those caveats, the numbers are:

Romney 0.113%
Giuliani 0.105%
Thompson 0.064%
McCain 0.0003%
Ron Paul 0.118%

and for comparison

Hillary 0.170%
Obama 0.12%

Note that all of these numbers are for blog posts on October 22, 2007 and the numbers spike up and down a great deal each day so this is only a static snapshot that may not be indicative of any larger trends. But it does appear that on the 22nd at least, Ron Paul was the most blogged about of the Republican candidates.

I'm honestly not sure how much or how little relevance to attach to any of these findings. I also realize that there are many, many other data points that could be examined that might lead to a truer and fuller picture of the state of Paul's campaign. I doubt my Ron Paul supporter friends over on Blog Catalog will be too thrilled that I sum it up-

Ron Paul-- last in money, first in buzz, except for Hillary.