Washington State is not known for having a hefty evangelical vote, which is why I was shocked to hear that Huckabee was coming close to him in the state caucus. Turns out that McCain is pulling down 26 to Huckabee’s 24. Where’s the rest you might ask? Ron Paul us running at 21% in the caucuses.  Someone in Ron Paul’s camp in Washington State really has their shit together if they got enough people out to their caucuses.
I’ve said before that Ron Paul isn’t a guy you can build a serious political movement around, but there is something behind it that the GOP can’t really ignore.  The same can be said of Mike Huckabee. The Republicans would appear to continue to be refusing to unite behind a single candidate. The media reported that McCain has this thing locked up.  Ohio and Texas are going to be critical for McCain. If McCain loses both of them, Pennsylvania might actually matter, which means I will need to think carefully before deciding to lodge a protest vote.
I talked to some Ron Paulers in WA and they said they were delegates even though they were outnumbered. I can testify to this to happening many times over in Denver too. Ron Paulers in general were more active in the caucuses and secured more delegate slots than the preference polls indicate. Ron Paul will win LA, CO, ME, and WA and possibly NV. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill as now the rest of the states are primaries where Paul will lose to Diebold.
ME? The Republican primary in Maine was over a week ago.
Besides, Dr. Paul probably is more focused on keeping TX14 than anything else right now.
Yep… all a Diebold conspiracy. It has nothing to do with Ron Paul supporters being a small minority, clearly.
[quote]Yep… all a Diebold conspiracy. It has nothing to do with Ron Paul supporters being a small minority, clearly.[/quote]
Regardless of the fact that he is getting fewer votes overall, in NH there’s clear evidence of vote tampering in towns that count electronically. In one town, Ron Paul got 0 votes in the results, and many people came forward and said that they had voted for him.
Either that or they told their Ron Paul supporting family member they’d vote for him just so he’d leave them alone :)
Yes, forums… always a great bastion of irrefutable proof.
That’s not to say that I like electronic vote counting. For a lot of reasons, it’s a bad idea. But Ron Paul lost because he appeals to a small minority of voters. The sooner folks accept that reality, and start working to change it, instead of living in denial, the better off we’ll be.
I don’t think McCain has this as locked up as much as both he & the media would like it to be. The media would love for McCain to be the Republican nominee because they would then be able to have a liberal Republican as a fall back in case either Hillary or Obama were to loose.
My primary is already over but gun owners in the remaining states need to unite behind either Huckabee or Paul – I’d say Huckabee has a better chance than Paul. Although Huckbaee is not as conservative as I’d like in many areas, he is more conservative than McCain, and he is 100% behind the second amendment with a strong record to prove it.
ANYBODY but anti so called “assault weapon” & anti “gun show loophole” McCain.
McCain was not ever in favor of the assault weapons ban and voted against it every time it has come up. There’s a lot of bullshit being spread out there, and this is one of them.
To my mind Huckabee isn’t better than McCain… I’ll take McCain over the guy that wants to change the constitution to be closer to what he thinks Jesus would want. I also don’t really like Ron Paul’s brand of libertarianism either, so any way I vote this primary, I’m holding my nose, and McCain stands a chance of beating Obillery.
I am a Ron Paul supporter since way back, but in all fairness to McCain..
-McCain was never for the AWB. Not even in the early 90s when it was the cool political thing to ban guns.
-McCain is hated by gun owners for 2 reasons, McCain-Feingold and the anti-gun show activism. McCain Feingold is 99 pecrcent dead thanks to Wisconsin Right to Life v FEC that let it stand but made an exception that most political speech can jump through with ease. As for the gun shows, I don’t think that issue has legs and it isn’t like to be a threat.
-McCain’s views have not been great but they have long been far superior to anything either Bush gave us.
And about Huckabee:
-he is very conservative… socially
-but very liberal in terms of government size, taxation and spending. In other words, he is a christian populist
-I don’t think his strengths on social issues will be in play much if Heller goes our way but his weaknesses on spending will be a huge issue if the dems manage to ram through a tax boost or more spending.
And 90 percent of the bad stuff that GOA says about McCain isn’t true. The “anti-gun votes” he made were mostly connected with supporting meaningless anti-gun riders (the amendments literally do nothing) as a way of getting PLCAA passed.
I personally think GOA and Ron Paul played their cards wrong on PLCAA. I think it was constitutional and I think the extremely minor cost we paid to get it passed was well worth it. PLCAA was a HUGE victory. The tort suits against the gun industry were the strongest weapons the anti-gunners had in the late 90s/early 00’s and PLCAA completely killed that off.
I think McCain could be more pro-gun but I don’t think he is anti-gun, certainly not to the extent that Bush was or Hitlery will be. I mean if the NRA was “working out of the white house” the past 8 years while Bush let the ATF run wild, I can’t imagine what kind of awesome power the NRA will wield under McCain. I think McCain needs to cut out that bullshit about the gun shows but I think that GOA needs to give him a grade somewhere in the C+/B- range. His grade should at least be higher than Bush’s.
Huckabee reminds me too much of a Christian preacher version of George H.W. Bush – nice guy, very likable, and definitely preferable to Dukakis, but he was a one termer, and only won because he was Reagan’s VP, and voters wanted a third term for The Gipper.
Of the eight people who showed up for my precinct (somewhat rural), 5 were pledged to RP, and the two who claimed to support Huckabee didn’t know anything about RP (love the MSM!) and were only supporting Huckabee because they didn’t like McCain at all. They seemed very open to learning about RP and promised to visit his website and learn more – they weren’t at all happy with his position on illegal immigration and were pleased to hear RP’s position on borders.
‘course, it’s too late to do much good now.