When former American Idol champ Kelly Clarkson threw her support behind Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul last week, she did it out of genuine enthusiasm for Paul’s Libertarian-leaning ideas.

Strangely, the shout-out, which sparked a minor but intense flame war amongst her Twitter followers, may have ended up actually being lucrative for her.

In the wake of the Paul dust-up, Clarkson appears to have gotten a sales bump. Her 2011 album Stronger crept up to number 11 on the iTunes albums chart, and it is currently clocking in at number 14 on Amazon after spending most of the past month in the 40s. While we won’t have hard numbers until the SoundScan figures are released on Wednesday, it’s safe to say that Clarkson has sold more copies of Stronger than she did last week.

But before everybody jumps to the conclusion that there’s some sort of grassroots campaign by Paul’s followers to elevate Clarkson’s chart status, there are a number of issues that could be at play here. As stated before, it’s uncertain exactly how much of a sales increase is necessary to make the jumps that Stronger did, so the actual figures could be relatively insignificant all told.

And those sales might not be from Paul supporters looking to hitch their wagons to a star; rather, it could simply be people cashing in the gift cards in their Christmas stockings or finding replacement albums for all the duplicate copies of Adele’s 21 that their aunts gave them.

Besides, if Paul’s supporters were really mobilizing to throw their weight behind musicians who endorse their boy, then shouldn’t Michelle Branch‘s latest album rank higher than 3,854 on Amazon?

Clarkson certainly got some headlines, which maybe led to some awareness and thus increased sales, but it’s hard to judge on such limited information. Just in case, maybe Adam Lambert should give Newt Gingrich a shout-out to test our theory? Your move, Glambert.