Paul Purged from Pajamas Poll

Commenter "jf" notes in the post below that Pajamas Media has eliminated Ron Paul from its weekly online straw poll. This is odd, considering that Paul had a 2-1 lead over his nearest competitor in last week's poll, and came in the second the week before.

Pajamas Media says it's implementing a new policy where only candidates who garner one percent or more of the vote in the previous month's Gallup poll are eligible for its online poll. But Paul wasn't listed as an option in Gallup's last poll. I don't know Gallup's reason for not including him. But even if Gallup's people don't find Paul credible, he obviously does have quite a bit of credibility with Pajamas Media's readership.

The only other candidate eliminated from the Republican field by the new policy is former senator Fred Thompson, who hasn't even announced.

Seems like a strange policy that eliminates the previous week's top vote-getter. It's even stranger when you consider the fact that the only real use of a straw poll from Pajamas Media would be to determine which candidates might be resonating with the blogosphere. On the right, the blogosphere skews libertarian. So Paul's ascendancy makes perfect sense. Hiding the fact that he's popular with the Internet right robs the poll of its only real utility.

Taking Paul off the list of options I guess makes the unscientific poll look more credible, in that its results are vaguely similar to those of national, more scientific polls. But you have to wonder why PM's editors would even bother with an online poll if they're just going to switch policies when they get results they don't like.

NOTE: Some commenters have noted that some Paul supporters had cheated the poll with bots and artificial voting. True. But according to the PM post on the "ballot stuffing," those votes were deducted from the candidate totals, and Paul still did very well. What's more, it isn't as if PM purged Paul from the poll to punish his supporters for their malfeasance. Supporters of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney did the same thing, and both of those names are still in the poll.