Will Ron Paul run as an independent?
 

I was switching through channels this morning waiting for football to come on and landed on a political talk show that had a round table of guests. Two of the five guests agree that since Ron Paul clearly is getting no respect from the republican machine and he isn't running for re-election to congress that he may enter the presidential race as an independent. He has the grass roots support and can raise some money so they ventured to guess he could get the 4-5% of the vote needed to be in the presidential debates.

Will he do it?

They all agreed if he did it was a guarantee that Obama wins a second term.

So, essentially the same thing as if he got the Republican nomination.

Basically, yeah.

No.

8char

Ron Paul would have better used his time building the Libertarian Party into a viable third choice, at least after the initial limelight.

America could do with 4 parties: Repubs, Dems, Libs and Progressives.

It would not be a guarantee that Obama would get a second term. Quite a few democrats have realised Obama is a fraud and would probably vote Republican for the first time in their lives.

obama is a shoo-in. the repub nominees are uniformly scary and stupid. even st. paul.

I wouldn't go that far. there are some independents that might have voted for Obama and would vote republican, but most democrats actually like Obama. Depending on the poll you see between 60% and 70% of democrats approve of the job he is doing and this is before he spends a billion dollars and campaigns like hell. Those that might be unhappy with him, when faced with the choice of Obama or a republican, likely would either not vote or would choose Obama again.

LOL. No offense brother but your numbers are way off. Ron Paul in a three way race between himself, Romney and Obama gets 18%, not 5% in major polls. Among Independents alone he kicks the piss out of Obama by 9 points and those numbers are now when he is getting 89 seconds in an hour long debate. If more people could actually hear his message not filtered by the idiot talking heads he would definitely win outright. Personally if he does not get the GOP nod I would prefer him to go Indie as I am a Paul supporter but I am not Republican, I am an Independent myself, so fuck the two party system.

"Meanwhile, a poll conducted by Public Policy Polling shows Paul is leading against President Obama amongst independent voters, 48 to 39 percent. In fact, Paul is the only GOP candidate to beat President Obama amongst independent voters." source

Ron said running 3rd party wasn't an option.

Here is some stuff I was looking at.
This shows that head to head vs Obama, Paul is down by 8 points and getting around 41% of the vote. Against his other republicans contenders for the nomination he is getting around 7.8% of the vote.

VS the various members of the republican field Obama is hovering somewhere around the 40-50% mark. So we can assume he would get somewhere in that area in the general election no matter who he is up against. If the republican and Paul split the remaining vote that puts him around 20-25% of the vote. That is plenty to get him into the debates, but nowhere near what he would need to win.

Paul's problem is that he is too extreme and too honest. When he says things like our foriegn policey helped cause 9/11 he might be correct, but people don't want to hear that. When he says he wants to shut down five branches of government he might be right, but that scares the shit out of a lot of people. A lot of people say they want change, but really, so long as they are doing okay, they don't want that much change.

I think Paul is a niche candidate. For every person that hears him and thinks he makes good sense there are a lot who thinks he sounds crazy.