One other thing that struck me at the Republican debate was the support for Ron Paul. His performance at the debate was typical, but his supporters definitely stood out. They were certainly the loudest in the debate hall (cheering and heckling from the back corner). More impressive was the Ron Paul fan presence outside the debate.

At the Democratic debate, supporters for most of the candidates were outside the debate hall with signs, chanting and stuff. There were more supporters for the big-name candidates, as you might expect, but everyone was represented.

At the Republican debate, this wasn’t at all the case. There was a huge crowd of Ron Paul supporters outside the debate hall, and at some other locations, in addition to signs near the airport, etc. Not only was there a huge Ron Paul presence, but I didn’t see ONE sign for any other candidate. Seven other candidates and not one sign outside.

The internet is much the same: while I was in Florida, I played around a bit with Google Trends. This graph shows the number of queries for some of the candidates.

Ron Paul is in light blue.
Red = Rudy
Green = Barack
Orange = Mitt
Purple = Hillary
(click the image to go to google trends)

The top section shows the number of search queries by candidate, the bottom shows the number of news articles about them. Note that Ron Paul is the most-searched-for but least discussed in the news. I’m not trying to make this sound like a conspiracy, but it’s interesting.

We thought that it might be some sort of query spam, but upon closer inspection, several different geographies are showing the same story, which makes spam seem unlikely. Part of the query volume could have to do with more people wanting to learn more about Ron Paul, and isn’t necessarily indicative of support (i.e. people are less likely to do a search for Rudy Guliani, since most people already know about him).

A few airports I’ve been to on this trip that have free wireless internet:
- Las Vegas (LAS)
- Hartford (BDL)
- Tampa (TPA)

JFK, FLL, and PHL didn’t seem to. JFK did have nice places to plug in laptops, though.

Lots of posts coming, in random order.

Last night was the second CNN/YouTube debate. I got some pretty good seats, and was at the edge of the area they were showing a lot on TV, which means I might have been on screen for a bit, but it also meant we had lights shining in our eyes a lot.

Highlight:
I was about 5 feet away from CHUCK NORRIS! Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet him and he didn’t come to the Google/YouTube party after the debate. Regardless, it was exciting.

As you may know, Norris recently endorsed Mike Huckabee:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDUQW8LUMs8

The debate was.. interesting. It was weird: some actual debate broke out a couple of times. Additionally, this debate was far rougher than the Democratic one. Not just the candidates, but the crowd was really tough, booing when they didn’t like an answer, yelling things sometimes. A lot of that was from Ron Paul’s crew, I think, but I’ll post about that separately.

I thought that the questions were generally good. The answers ranged from good to terrible, I think. My least favorite was Rudy’s answer to “What should we do to repair the image of America in the Middle East?”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noLw6KpgTaQ

You can watch the rest of the questions and responses here.

The amount of Hillary-bashing the candidates did surprised me. She was a punching bag for a lot of the candidates. I’m not a big Hillary fan, but I found this to be excessive and wasteful. I thought about it afterward and realized that this may have been fueled by the tough crowd. Hillary-bashing was the one thing they all could agree on, so candidates use that to get applause and support from the audience.

As part of the debate, each campaign is asked to submit a short “youtube-style” video from their campaign to be played around commercial breaks. At the Democratic debate, it was quite clear which campaigns knew what “youtube-style” meant and which didn’t (some just submitted campaign commercials, which wasn’t the point). I expected the Republicans to learn from this, but they didn’t. Rudy’s was the best, as it was at least tongue-in-cheek in part, but none of them were youtube-style, which was disappointing. Thompson played an attack ad in that spot, which was pretty awkward and was a poor decision.

Getting on the plane soon, more posts to follow…