RON PAUL GRAPHS BLOG

The End

2008-04-05T14:07:00.002-04:00

The campaign has turned off the live donation stats. The utility of RonPaulGraphs.com is now pretty much non-existent... there are a few graphs that will continue to update, but for the most part there isn't much of interest left on this site.

If you want to follow my projects, I have a new blog and a new project related to government transparency here in Maine.

I'll probably be taking a break from the graphs for a bit.. but I am proud of the technology and I'll be doing something with it in the future, for sure. Keep an eye on the new blog if you care :)

I have to say that this project has really opened up my eyes to a number of things; from the importance of monetary policy, to the illusion of choice in our two party system, to the power of a good message, to the impact a single individual can have, and many other things... It's been great and a life changing experience for me.

While I never completely agreed with the entirety of the Ron Paul platform, he certainly hit the big issues out of the park for me, and that was more than enough to get my support. I'll still be voting for RP at my state convention... And I suspect I'll be voting Libertarian Party or Constitution Party (as usual) in November. I hope you'll all join me. Never vote Republican or Democrat again, please.

I might be back here for another post when I resurrect the graph stuff, or if anything really exciting happens in the Ron Paul candidacy.

Thanks to everyone for the massive support and great feedback for the last 6+ months.

Ron Paul For Congress

2008-02-17T19:30:00.003-05:00

There have been quite a few requests.. so now I am collecting the financial data from ronpaulforcongress.com. There aren't many graphs as I just started collecting the data... more to come.

there are more here but most will be boring for another week or so.

there is also a new graph tracking progress for Trevor Lyman's new effort over at breakthematrix.com

More On The Maine Caucus And Your Vote

2008-02-04T14:33:00.000-05:00

From my local meetup leader and prolific organizer, Mark:

We have a tremendous Grass Roots organization up here in Maine, and we are proud to report that we are the 1st State in the entire nation to get Ron to the 20% threshold (reports show him at 19% with 70% of the vote in). This should be plastered all over the campaign website, and blog, and a press release done NOW so the Super Tuesday States can see it and see what is possible when we do our job of GOTV. The sad part is, I know of several instances all over this state (including my own town) where several "professed" Ron supporters ended up BLOWING OFF their Caucuses. Folks, this is a fact: If all our people came out and SHOWED UP, we would have bested McCain in this media/preference poll. THINK ABOUT THAT AND ACT NOW. THERE IS STILL TIME. BRING YOUR WIFE/HUSBAND/SIGNIFIGANT OTHER/SIBLING/FAMILY MEMBERS/FRIEND/NEIGHBOR.

Also, even better news to report about Delegates. In Maine, the preference poll you're hearing about in the media is NON-BINDING and has nothing to do with getting Ron nominated. The critical part of the Caucus is having people step forward/volunteer/be nominated as Delegates from their town to goto our State Convention (May 3rd). It is THOSE delegates that cast the binding vote in Maine. Our grass roots network are reporting an average of 35% of all delegates being known/committed Ron Delegates. There are most likely more that we don't know about yet. But 35% is a good conservative figure at this time. What we just did in Maine should set an example and inspire all remaining States out there, and especially tomorrow's! Thank you, Mark D

It is absolutely critical that every supporter shows up at their caucus or primary.. The caucus events might be long, boring and painful, but it's only a few hours and is a trivial price to pay to have your voice heard. Please help get the vote out.. every vote counts and as we've seen here in Maine, even 100 people can mean the difference between a 2nd and a 3rd place finish. For more about the caucus here in Maine, read my lengthy post on the topic here.

Oh yeah

2008-02-03T18:14:00.000-05:00

GO PATRIOTS!

34-17

UPDATE: booooooooooooooooooooooooooo

the only loser tonight was history.

My Caucus

2008-02-03T09:33:00.000-05:00

This post is completely unrelated to fundraising and graphs. I went to the first caucus of my life yesterday here in Maine. I wanted to share my experience and a letter I wrote when I returned home.

As I write this, the results aren't all in yet but so far with 68% of the votes in it looks like RP will be getting 3rd place with 19% of the vote to 21% for McCain and 52% for Romney.

Now what about the caucus itself. Right as I walked in the door, there were piles of things to be signed, getting republicans on the ballot for this position or that.. when I declined to sign the form to put our "republican" sheriff on the ballot, there were disparaging remarks made about my girlfriend and I as we walked away... something to the tune of "nothing like a good republican"... dripping with sarcasm, of course... I felt quite good about my decision after hearing a few speakers, including the sheriff.

Following the indiscriminate signing of yellow papers by the 200-300 people in attendance was about 1.5-2 hours of speeches by 6 or 7 people who are either running for some local office or a family member speaking for them. The over whelming theme of the day was mushy emotional talks about the importance of family, "honor", and how great it is to be a Repblican. The sheriff talked about all the "wonderful programs" he had helped create and all the "outreach" he helped to initiate from the department to the community. Tag Romney told bad jokes and pandered to the Patriots and Red Sox fans in the room with some anecdotes about working for the Dodgers and being a big Red Sox fan... then he went on to some anecdotes about how "cheap" Mitt is. "Everyone" loved it. We even had a young lady who was stumping for her father (running for county rep, I think) who is serving in Iraq, yet somehow running for office here in Maine. I think it goes without saying that everyone in the room supports the troops... but running for your first term as a local politician from another continent doesn't seem like a tenable strategy to me...

The Grand Finale was a speech by Senator Susan Collins. I was mildly annoyed with the complete lack of content up to this point... but by the time Susan was done speaking I was mentally counting down the days until I can switch back to being a registered independent. She started right into a list of the faults of our congressional rep, Tom Allen (I'm sure he has plenty, but it seemed out of place to me) including the fact that he missed over 100 roll call votes, to which the Romney supporter standing next to me and myself both quietly said "is that bad?!"... In between her attacks of Tom Allen (which were plentiful and VERY well received) she filled us in on her fantastic Republican credentials.. With such gems as "I tripled funding for diabetes research" and "I've never missed a vote" not to mention all the bills she has sponsored... I sent the following letter to her when I got home:

Senator Collins,

I was in Bath today where you came to talk to the Republican caucus goers. Thank you for coming. I had a few concerns I would like your response to.

You mentioned a Senate resolution condemning the "General Betray Us" ad by MoveOn.org. I am very concerned that the Senate is wasting time and money discussing meaningless newspaper ads. What purpose did this condemnation serve? It seems like a purely political maneuver... I think using the Senate to "condemn" a non-profit organization for exercising their freedom of speech (however misguided, or not) is an embarrassment to the Senate and our country.

The second topic from today that I wanted to bring up is your mention of tripling the funding of diabetes research... Why is the government doing medical research at all, and why should I, a conservative, vote for someone who uses increases in spending as a selling point?

I don't think you mentioned cutting spending once... I don't think a single Republican that spoke today mentioned spending cuts. There was plenty of talk of lowering taxes... and "successful" programs... but not one mention of a program that should be cut. With a 3 trillion dollar budget, 250 billion deficit, and a 9.2 trillion dollar debt, it seems like cutting spending should be on the tip of every conservative tongue. Our debt will soon exceed our GDP (and might already if adjusted for inflation)... this is a crisis, not even a few million $600 checks will help if we can't reign in and reverse this trend towards explosive government spending.

To me, being a conservative means fighting over every dollar spent as well as every dollar taxed. It means closing the doors of federal bureaucracies and ruthlessly trimming the fat in programs that cannot be terminated. It feels like the Republican party is no longer the conservative party at all, but rather the right wing of the Democratic party with a different set of pet programs.

Thank you,
dan bachelder

Not only was there no talk of cutting spending, there was really no talk of policy at all. I guess the assumption is, that if you are in that room, you either already know all about every speaker's policies or you just trust them to do "what is right". Well not this Republican. I can watch attack ads and listen to feel good emotional BS on the Hallmark channel right here from the comfort of my couch. I didn't take 4 hours out of my Saturday to listen to it standing in a 100 degree gymnasium. I guess I can understand the smugness and preaching-to-the-choir mentality that was going on there, but that doesn't make it any less ridiculous. If you didn't know better you'd think the Republican party was having a renaissance! Everything is peachy... of course a Republican will be president after the next election... of course Republican policy is right on target.... of course the huge turnout is due to their successes, not their failures.

After all the speeches we broke up into groups by town to cast our vote for the presidential preference poll and choose delegates. 13 people showed up from my tiny town (population 2-3k) which I was told was a record turn out. As they talked about that fact, several people spontaneously made it known that they are embarrassed to tell people they are Republican, one woman said she wouldn't tell people because she was sure it would cost her business customers!

The first order of business was selecting officers for our town party... not one volunteer. The next order of business was selecting delegates.. we get 9 slots to fill... so I assumed we'd be arguing over who would get to go... nope.. all three Ron Paul voters became delegates, along with 2 others... 4 remaining open slots, no volunteers... keep in mind the actual state caucus is 3 months away. Next order of business, the preference poll which went thusly:

Mitt: 6
Paul: 3
Huck: 2
Keys: 1
McCain: 1

While my girlfriend filled out her write-in ballot for Ron Paul there were audible and visible negative responses from the women on either side of her, both women were in the group that spoke up about being embarrassed to tell people they were Republican and one of them was the business owner I mentioned earlier. Immediately following the count, a Romney supporter made the motion to close business and go home, it was seconded and we left.

My conclusions... the high turn out is due to the collapse of the Republican party (it certainly wasn't due to an influx of Ron Paul support), party members see it, so they came, hoping to have some impact... to hear some good news and have the opportunity to turn things around... but, of course they can't see the salvation of their party when it's staring them right in the face. At the end of they day, every one of them was willing to sign their name on anything stamped with an "R" and applaud and cheer for every social program mentioned and pat themselves on the back for every mention of "family" or "honor" or "The Troops". I can say with certainty now, that even on the local level the Republican party is no friend to the true conservative and it's pretty obvious why people are literally embarrassed to be a part of it.

If I am called, I will go to the Republican meeting in our town, just to have the chance to ask them if they share my concerns at all... If the response is favorable, I may consider involving myself more deeply in local party politics in order to have an influence on the line of discourse at the next caucus.

A quick note to Ron Paul supporters... If you're having a conversation while people are speaking (no matter what you think of them) you're a huge jerk and should be asked to leave. If you can't be bothered to go to your local caucus, why are you involved at all? With all the signs around my county, I was expecting a pretty good contingent of support at the caucus... didn't happen. Your money, your letters, your emails, sign waving, all those videos you watched on youtube, all those comments you wrote on the internets, all the talking you have been doing for months... all of it is worthless if you can't even be bothered to vote. The rubber meets the road in the voting booth and if you can't do your part, you don't exist and never did.

Needless to say.. the caucus made me cranky.... but at least we got the majority of delegates in my town. Thanks for reading.

The Final Push

2008-02-01T20:58:00.000-05:00

Just a bit under 3 hours left in the day. $41,000 an hour puts us over the $1,000,000 mark... we're basically doubling my prediction for the day... pretty cool.

Boy Was I Wrong!

2008-02-01T14:12:00.000-05:00

With just under 10 hours left in the day, we have taken the #4 spot and blown away my prediction... Now the question is, can we break $1 million? less than $470k to go at 2:15pm

here is a new graph and a couple updated ones:

Incoming!

2008-01-31T18:38:00.000-05:00

Just a few more hours until the multiple money bomb event... See my previous blog post for the details and graphs.

The lead time was way below most of the big money bomb events.. So I'm predicting $465,381... which would put the day at the 5th best day since the start of recorded data. That said... there is a pretty good chance (in my opinion) that we'll take the #4 spot from RudysReadingList (11/30/07). Please add your prediction in the comments below.

I've seen a few optimistic folks predicting over a million dollars for the day... I'd love to eat my words... but with the limited lead time and exposure of the two major efforts tomorrow, I think a figure of that size is pretty unlikely. Please do your best to prove me wrong! sign up for these events... tell your friends... If you know you're getting a tax refund this year (or the stupid "stimulus" check) please try to donate a little more.

Double Barrel

2008-01-27T21:50:00.000-05:00

Friday, February 1st, it's two money bombs in one.

LibertyTax08.com:

I pledge $500 to be donated on February 1st 2008 to raise awareness of the 16th Amendment, 'ratified' February 3rd, 1913. The IRS requires us to testify against ourselves directly in opposition of the 5th Amendment. It is time to make a stand, join the rEVOLution, end the IRS, and fund Dr. Paul for the long term.

FiftyOneYears.com:

Please join us this February 1st for the Ron and Carol Paul 51st wedding anniversary mass donation day. Our goal is to bring together 100,000 people to donate $51 each, creating a one day donation total of $5,100,000.

It's very short notice, but I feel a top ten day coming on. Spread the word.

Yes We Can

2008-01-21T12:54:00.000-05:00

It's not a Tea Party, and it's not Nov 5th, but it's the next best thing! We'll certainly raise well over a $1 million... already the 3rd best fundraising day of the campaign... we're back on top of the fundraising contest with Huckabee...

I'm sure I'm not alone in saying this has been a depressing month... bad fundraising numbers.. disheartening scandal... poor showing in some early primary states... but with the 2nd place in NV, and the great fundraising showing today I feel my hope and enthusiasm returning. I hope this is our second wind.

Due to overwhelming popular demand, here is a graph showing today vs. Nov 5th and Dec 16th (and some other big days):

Don't forget that being a precinct leader is even more valuable than money! Here is a new widget from the campaign:

Can We Do It Again?

2008-01-21T00:27:00.000-05:00

Today is the Free At Last money bomb!

here it is versus some of the other big days:

"Only" 10,000 people signed up this time, so I'm not expecting Nov 5th or Dec 16th type numbers, but it should still be pretty good.

Precinct Leader Graph

2008-01-12T23:50:00.000-05:00

As many of you know, the campaign is getting people to sign up as precinct leaders. I'm now graphing that data:

sign up if you can!

Happy NH Day

2008-01-08T00:25:00.000-05:00

Well, It's The Big Day! I'm hoping for a top 3 finish... I probably don't need to remind anyone to go vote :)

In other news... Today is the 100th day of data. Monday the 7th was the 12th best day of those 100 days! Ron Paul sent out this message at about 5:30pm and turned the day into a $142k day... $120k in about 6.5 hours, not bad.

I think we've got our next big moneybomb... It's not going to be a tea party, but it's going to be pretty big.

Some Fixes For 2008 And A New Graph

2008-01-01T16:29:00.000-05:00

I think I have fixed most of the glaring problems.. let me know if you see something I missed!

I think the new donors/donors/donations numbers look much more accurate now too.

I finally put together a graph which includes all of 2007 and will continue to grow throughout the campaign.

Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T02:25:00.000-05:00

$387,954 on the last day of the 2007.. 5th best day of the year.. only $1400ish away from 4th place!

$19,560,782 for the quarter by my count! It'll probably be more once the offline totals, store totals and refunds are all accounted for.. just 15 days until the absolutely official numbers.... but will anyone care after the good news in IA and NH?

This is the first new quarter and new year that I've hit here at RonPaulGraphs.. so there are a few problems.. I fixed the big ones.. but there are several others, especially on the text stats page.. I'm going to fix those up tomorrow.

If you see anything wrong, please comment on this post and I'll try to address everything tomorrow.

Today there were some server problems.. we overwhelmed the new setup a few times. I've upgraded my server to the best machine offered by godaddy... so I'm moving again.. I hope it will be completely seamless... But over the next week there might be a few hiccups as everything transfers. If there's a problem after this, I'm going to get some professional help!

You thought 2007 was cool... hold on!

Happy New Year, Revolution!
Dan

The Inevitable Comparisons

2007-12-31T13:59:00.000-05:00

I don't spend to much time checking out the "other" candidates but I felt this deserved a little comment :)

For those that don't know, the Huckabee grass roots effort organized a money bomb style event on December 27th.

"Some people will inevitably try to compare our fundraiser with Ron Paul's largest moneybombs. But we feel that the only accurate and fair comparisons would be with other holiday fundraisers." - Huck's Army

They link to a couple screen shots of forum posts and a web site I'd never seen before as evidence of the failure of our efforts. We only raised $23k on that day compared to their 90k.

Just 3 days later on December 30th a single email from the Ron Paul campaign (sent the night before) brought in $97k.

The very next day, the fairly well known donate2008.org Ron Paul money bomb kicked off bringing in over $300k, more than 3 times the amount raised by the Huckabee event.

The Ron Paul campaign had 23 days in Q4 which brought in more than the Huckabee money bomb... many of those were grassroots organized events.

Just to keep things in perspective :)

Last Money Bomb Of 2007, Mobile Pages, And More

2007-12-30T23:33:00.000-05:00

December 31st is the last money bomb of 2007 please give all you can!

Mobile Pages

The site is getting more complex and fancy... and isn't playing as nice with some mobile devices and accessibility devices, like screen readers.

For the mobile devices, I have created this page... I have an iPhone.. so it's geared towards that platform.

For non-iPhone users or people with other lower end browser needs, I have mostly resurrected the old index page and the old text stats page. They are linked from the bottom of the new mobile page...

More
It's been a busy few days.. the new main page, text stat page and the new widgets seem pretty solid to me now.. I'm pretty happy with how it's all turned out.. but nothing is ever set in stone.

I think these widgets are going to be pretty cool... I hope everyone puts them to good use :)

Don't like the new pages for some reason? let me know.. got bugs on your browser? let me know... cool idea for the widget? you know...

Thanks everyone!

Embeddable Graphs And Stats

2007-12-29T21:00:00.000-05:00

Ok... I think I've got version 1.0 complete of my new widget complete... if you have some ideas on how to make it better... or you have a problem with it in your browser.. let me know.

The text stats page has now been updated to use the widget in all slots. Auto refresh is working.

I'll be working on getting the front page and directory page set up with these as well

A Long Days Work

2007-12-28T23:19:00.000-05:00

I've been working on this sucker all day:

It's not quite done and subject to change at any moment... but I thought I'd show you what's up... (if you're reading this in an RSS reader or email, you'll probably need to go to the blog to see all the awesome.)

The little icons under the graph should tell you what they do when you mouse over them... let me know what you think...

Those little icons are from here.. they're totally free and very nice looking.

Graph Comments

2007-12-27T23:49:00.001-05:00

I noticed people were interested in graph comments in the sidebar poll... So I started looking around for a canned solution and found disqus.com... Pretty cool.. and just about exactly what I am looking for, I think... Every graph page now has a comment thread under the graph!

I hope this thing just works and I don't have to write my own :) If anyone is aware of other solutions like this one, let me know.. I'm always happy to get feedback.. good or bad.. It looks like I can tweak quite a bit with this disqus platform.. I'm currently using mostly default settings, so there is probably room for improvement.

Alive And Kicking

2007-12-27T15:38:00.000-05:00

I hope every one had a great Christmas or Whatever. I've been home for a couple days... plugging away... researching some technologies to incorporate into my graph making software... there's always something to tweak.

There have been a few questions about the number of donations vs. donors vs. new donors... the numbers always seem a little weird.. I agree.. for instance:

total donations today: 176
donors today: 127
new donors today: 126

Only one repeat donor? But 50 people are donating twice? this is just what the numbers in the feed tell me... I subtract the number of donors/new donors/donations at 12am in the morning from the number right now... and those are the numbers that shake loose.

I have a couple emails out trying to find out if there's a problem, or if this is just the way things really are. When I know, so will you.

Just as an experiment I've added a chat widget thing... we'll see if it's interesting to anyone :) let me know what you think... would forums be better? or nothing at all?

I think I have answered all the email I got while I was out.. If you didn't get a response from me and you expected one, please resend... I might have forgotten to mark a couple for followup or deleted something by mistake.. there were many to review!

UPDATE: new poll in the side bar

Help For Ohio, Site Updates, Money Barrage

2007-12-20T17:57:00.000-05:00

There's a problem in Ohio:

They need lots of signatures by the 27th to get on the ballot! Are you in Ohio? Know someone there? Help out if you can.

Site Updates:

The feed seems like it's good to go now... everything is back to normal.

I have completed the bulk of the work I mentioned, the distinction between donors and donations should now be consistent site wide. The donor graphs will be quite boring for another week or so... I have created new donation graphs that look like you would expect... if there is one I didn't make that you're particularly interested in, drop me a line and I'll put it on the list for after the holiday.

I'm in the progress of moving the web pages to another host so my dedicated server can be responsible for just the dynamic stuff like generating graphs, gathering data, banner rotation, and any other stuff I add. This should be a seamless transition from your perspective.... I hope!

I'll be gone from Saturday - Tuesday... I might be able to check in a couple times, but that's up in the air... I will be far from wireless access or even electricity. Just a heads up.. I'll probably mention it again before I leave :)

Money Barrage

In order of appearance (source):

Dec 23rd - RonPaulMoneyBomb.com - The weekly money bomb

Dec 25th - Gift2RonPaul.com - Gift To Ron Paul - no graph

Dec 31st - Donate2008.org - New Years Eve Money Bomb

Jan 1st - NewYearsRevolution08.com - New Years Revolution - no graph

Jan 21st - FreeAtLast2008.com - Free at Last 2008 - no graph

pick one.. pick a couple.. pick them all! Keep the money rolling in!

A Little Down Time

2007-12-19T22:31:00.000-05:00

The feed had some problems for a couple hours... starting exactly 5 minutes after I stepped out for dinner and a trip into the city... of course :)

The feed seems like it's back up and I have removed the bogus data. There may or may not be more problems.. but I'm home now and jacked back in... so bring on the problems!

UPDATE: There may still be a few problems.. we might have to wait until morning before everything is back together again.. there could be minor data loss (just for RonPaulGraphs, not the campaign) if the feed has been incorrect while they are doing maintenance.

Some New Donor Stats

2007-12-19T12:27:00.000-05:00

The "estimated new donors today" stat on the text stats page is no longer an estimate, it is derived from the official numbers. I have also added a "donors today" stat to that page.

So now we have daily donations, donors and new donors. To help clear up any confusion.. If I were to donate to the campaign twice today, that would be 2 donations, 1 donor and 0 new donors (as I have given before).

I have less than a full day of some of this data right now, but I will be providing a graph of it as soon as it fills out a little more. I don't have the total number of new donors for the quarter.. just for the week, so it's a bit hard to do anything particularly interesting with that right now.

There are a number of terminology problems on the site right now with regard to "donor" and "donation", until recently I have been calling the "donation" number "donor"... someone convinced me back in October that this made sense.. but in the light of the new data I have access to, it's wrong and confusing.. I will be working on fixing this terminology and renaming things appropriately. The problem is that it's a fairly large task and not fun... at all :) I hope to make some good progress on it today.. but I probably won't have everything correctly labeled for a little while.. sorry for the confusion.. If you have a favorite graph that currently says "donors" in the title... don't be alarmed if it changes to a lower number... that's just me switching over to the actual number of donors.. I will introduce a bunch of new graphs that actual deal with the donation number after I have taken care of this problem. Look for another update here when I have completed this body of work.

New Offline Graphs

2007-12-19T11:01:00.001-05:00

I've made some pretty big changes to the way things are working behind the scenes. The first fruits of that labor are offline totals that update as soon as the campaign updates them, as opposed to me updating them manually when I notice or am notified... as well as these two graphs:

I have populated a couple historic data points with some known values... but from the 16th forward these graphs will reflect the publicly available offline data as it becomes available.

There are more new graphs and changes in the works, stay tuned... same Bat Time, same Bat Channel... that makes no sense, but I enjoyed typing it.