What gave me cause to even think about both the 1992 and the 1964 presidential campaigns was a post that I saw on a tea party discussion thread that featured the below graphic:

. . . Which had me thinking, "Wow, really?"  Four states that, collectively, could have converted a Democrat rout to a Republican squeaker - the same four states identified in a post-election Breitbart article - went by margins smaller than the popular support for Ron Paul in those same states' republican presidential primaries.

Now, to be fair, Ron Paul and his supporters haven't received the kindest treatment here on RightMichigan.  That said, we've also chronicled the multiple occurrences of when either the RNC, or a particular state party, or the Romney campaign itself played fast and loose with the party's own rules, or outright violated them, in order to ensure that the heir-apparent to the nomination received the coronation that he had duly bought and paid for.  (The states of Florida, Nevada, Michigan, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Ohio, Virginia, Louisiana, Colorado, Rhode Island, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, and Iowa come to mind.)  The ultimate moment of infamy came on a scripted rules change vote, recorded here:

. . . I mean, honestly, wasn't this the same session in which the RNC earlier refused to seat the Maine delegation, because it included apparently too many Ron Paul delegates?  And it wasn't even necessary.  Only Santorum (6 states) and Paul (5 states) had delegate plurality support in enough states to rate a presence on the first convention ballot; Romney's first-ballot support was sufficiently overwhelming no matter what.  Clearly, the establishment elites seemed to so believe that everyone who wasn't a hardcore Democrat would simply line up behind the nominee - because he's our only chance to beat Obama - that they didn't bother to concern themselves with any potential fallout from their "cereal bowl as urinal" treatment of any serious challenger to Mitt-flop's coronation.  And therein lay perhaps their most serious overestimation of grassroots loyalty.

See, it wasn't just Ron Paul whose campaign was undermined by the establishment kleptocracy.  At various points during the primary process, they also crapped on the campaigns of Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum . . . enough, I'm told, to permanently alienate about ten percent of each campaign's supporters in each and every state.  Clearly, these idiots didn't really think through Reagan's Eleventh Commandment, else they'd have realized that "do no harm" has its limits.  Forcibly tamping down dissent also calls to mind John F. Kennedy's admonition that those who make peaceful takeover impossible will ultimately make a revolt inevitable (and perhaps necessary), which I've been referencing regularly since September of 2010.  Said revolt can take on many forms, including simply sitting out a critical election.

And that brings us back to that four-state graphic.  How plausible is the theory that Ron Paul support in four states would have been enough to swing the outcome of the 2012 Presidential Election?

A key assumption of that theory is that Ron Paul's primary supporters universally took one of two protest actions in the general election: either (a) sat out the presidential election, or (b) voted "not republican," likely either via third party or writing in "Ron Paul" (the latter of which I'm told happened in unprecedented numbers nationwide).  Unless you're prepared to interview the 395,040 Ron Paul primary voters in those four states, assuming that you could accurately track them down and that they would answer you honestly if you did, there's no way to actually verify this assumption.  But for argument's sake, let's just go ahead and call it a given.

The next step, of course, is to verify the general election vote totals for the states in question, as well as Ron Paul's primary vote totals in the same states.  (We have to verify the accuracy of the source information, after all.)  I also expanded the "search" a tad.  Using the Colorado University model that I discussed about six weeks ago as my reference point, I went back and reviewed the totals for each of the seven states that the model projected would go Obama, but by well under five points, as well as the ten states that the model projected to go for Romney, but that went POTUS blue instead.  Necessarily, this included the four states in question.  Where possible, I verified the information with the respective state election authority; where not, I used The Green Papers as source information (and I'm sure that Tony Roza will appreciate the shout-out).  The end result is an overview of how many of a potential 194 electoral votes could have theoretically been flipped into Romney's column by the support of Ron Paul's primary voters.

As the chart at this link makes clear, the basic theory is plausible for only three states: Florida, New Hampshire, and Ohio; not so much for the remaining fourteen (though Virginia is tantalizingly close), which still leaves Romney 13 electoral votes short.  However, a slightly deeper analysis notes that the combined support of Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry (assuming that enough of them took the same protest actions in the general election as the Ron Paul supporters), could have combined with the Paul supporters to flip the outcome in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (and reduce Obama's margin in Iowa to a mere 7,335 votes).  Unfortunately, we're never going to know for sure how much support Gingrich and Perry had in Virginia, because the state party changed the signature verification rules mere weeks before the filing deadline for the Virginia primary.

Ultimately, of course, we are never going to know empirically how much support the Republican Party alienated in 17 key states, ten of which Romney should have won, all of which he could have won, and at least four of which he needed to win.  The "scorched earth" approach to the primary process, risking alienating critical grassroots support in key states, was but one factor among many that combined to cost the Republican Party big nearly three full weeks ago.

That having been said, anyone who's at all familiar with Ron Paul's supporters knows that his primary voters tend to also be motivated grassroots volunteers.  And in 17 key states, I'm thinking that a total of about 875,887 motivated neighborhood canvassers would have been really handy.

So whose bright idea was it to treat them like they didn't matter?