Ryan W. McMaken

LRC Blog

March 13, 2012

In some places, such as Maine and Minnesota, Ron Paul is likely to outperform the straw polls in terms of proportion of delegates won. As Lew Rockwell has noted, here and here, Ron Paul activists are sometimes able to take control of the local machines.

Sometimes, however, the opposite apparently happens. As The Washington Times reported on March 10th, Paul actually underperformed his vote tally in Wyoming with local caucuses over the weekend.

If you’ve ever been a Ron Paul delegate, you know that the GOP central committees will employ every trick in the book to avoid having to seat Ron Paul delegates. They will freely ignore their own bylaws, apply rules in such a manner as to only exclude Paul delegates, and will liberally employ intimidation tactics through verbal abuse, and even physical manhandling of delegates.

In the end, if everything else fails, they’ll attempt to get you to switch your vote by begging you to be a “team player” and by claiming that Romney is electable and that your dissent will keep Obama in power.

They did it in 2008, and some Ron Paul delegates switched their vote to the “electable” John McCain at the national convention, as I noted here.

I described my own delegate experience in 2008 here. Trust me, they’ll do everything they can to intimidate, harass or just plain exclude you. Be ready for it.

The video shows what is probably a fairly typical experience for many delegates:

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