There is more to it than people supporting one candidate or the other. Hannity never said that Paul's supporters stacked the deck; however, he did say the deck was stacked.
He's said several times at the various debate post coverage shows that Paul supporters were 'redialing' and 'stacking the deck' in his favor in the polls by doing so.
There could be lots of reasons why Ron Paul came out ahead: The younger crowd is going to be the one sending the text messages, and a lot of younger people tend to like Ron Paul, and I also feel that it's possible that democrats may have voted in this poll simply to throw everyone off.
All possible reasons, but all also forget the reciprocal is possible too. Bottom line is everyone is capable of picking up a phone and dialing in their winner for whatever reason, and those who would vote for the other candidates, again for whatever reason, just aren't texting in.
I don't see how you could possibly say that Huckabee is less likely to get the GOP nomination. He won over the crowd tonight...plus, Chuck Norris is voting for him.
The crowd is irrelevant. Or mostly irrelevant as things go. I've been in politics, local and state level and even went to Bush senior's inaugeration on invitation because of all the money we raised for him, my father in our state and me in a few schools. The candidate gets picked by party players and big donators in the end. It works on favors owed, favors promised, and the general belief among party decision makers that the candidate can run and win an national campaign. Party leaders will decide who has the best shot of beating Hilary and that candidate will start getting more and more attention and local support as they shift local campaigns and major donations in their favor and give them more time compared to other candidates, and by the time the nomination process comes to a finish that candidate will have general support in the GOP, a ****load of money and press time that no one else will be getting. Even from the Jesus freaks.
Huckabee will not win because he can't raise money and because he's too religious. Republicans learned a long time ago to marginalize their extreme religious right as much as possible in the mainstream. That's why in recent years you saw no where near as much of the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. They're campaign losers, they were politely ignored or perhaps even explicitly told to stand down and keep a low profile.
Paul will not win for various reasons. He has advantages over Huckabee in being able to raise a lot of money despite a second tier rating. But he's too anti war and will completely lose the big government neocon vote because he doesn't just pay lip service to the idea of limited government, he means it. Young people like him, my guess is when he loses the Republican nomination he might go to a third party ticket like the Libertarians and try and parly his GOP exposure to a decent campaign there.
The Republican candidate, barring some major voting upset that party leaders can't control, will be either Romney, Giuliani, or perhaps Thompson. They can all raise money, they can all lie comfortably enough to be everything to everybody and say all the right things in front of the crowds where it's necessary. They all have deep party support and can more or less keep the GOP whole and not shatter it over any particular issue. And they are all pro war which will keep the neocons happy.
And, barring Hillary Clinton stripping and dancing in pasties for Iranian and Al Qeda leaders, they'll all lose to her int he general election.
Hillary is the worse of all evils. Time to get her drunk with some Iranians and Osama Bin Laden at Las Vegas 
