Ron Paul: The Candidate Who Wasn't There, Yet is Sticking Around

Ron Paul is still running for president, and insists he'll continue to be until the Republican Party's convention in Tampa in 2012.

Where isn't Ron Paul?

*This CNN primary delegate chart.

*In this Townhall.com "Veepstakes" poll.

*In this robocall to GOP voters in New York from Vincent Reda, First Vice Chairman of the New York Republican State Committee, claiming that the "the other candidates have dropped out of the race," as reported in Digital Journal.

*And while this chart is no longer there as of this morning, the Cato Institute's David Boaz reported on Facebook last night that:

The Washington Post has a graphic on its homepage and on its Politics homepage reporting the results from Tuesday's 5 Republican primaries. In every state Romney won big, followed by Santorum, Gingrich, and "other" -- and oddly enough, "other" ran second in 3 of the 5 states. Gosh, who could that "other" candidate be? And why wasn't the candidate who ran second in most of the states listed in the Post graphic?

That chart being gone from both front page and politics page, at noon the day after five major primaries, is in and of itself an interesting sign of how quickly news is no longer news in the modern world. (It isn't that they've added Paul to such a results chart; it just isn't news anymore.)

UPDATE: The original chart, via Chris Braly's twitter.

In yesterday's votes, this mystery candidate Paul got these percentages: Rhode Island: 24 percent, New York: 17 percent, Connecticut: 13 percent, Pennsylvania: 13 percent, and Delaware: 11 percent. He beat Newt Gingrich in every state but Delaware; Gingrich is likely dropping out this week.

The Daily Beast on the meaning of Paul's pull yesterday and the Paul campaign's long game, longer than 2012:

The five states holding primaries on Tuesday—Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island—were all prime turf for Romney: heavily urbanized, high-Catholic populations with comparatively moderate Republican electorates. Romney did as well as expected, running the table in Connecticut and New York, and successfully ending Newt Gingrich's campaign by seizing the winner-take-all state of Delaware. But, in Rhode Island's proportional race and Pennsylvania's loophole primary, Ron Paul managed to slip in and grab delegates. In fact, Paul is expected to finish second in the overall delegate haul for the night despite investing almost no effort in the states contested.

Paul is focusing on accumulating delegates slowly but surely. As Rick Santorum noted in his CNN interview with Piers Morgan, "Ron Paul is working the delegates really hard. I can tell you that." In fact, Paul's strategy to work the convoluted process in caucus states has him in the catbird's seat in states Santorum won on caucus night, like Iowa and Minnesota.

The next step for the campaign is to try to maximize Paul's performance in his home state of Texas, which has a totally proportional primary on May 29. Paul spokesman Jesse Benton…acknowledged the increasing possibility that Paul would not be the GOP nominee, but made clear that the "secondary goal of all of our political action [has been] getting limited-government, libertarian-leaning folks involved and taking over the party apparatus."

Blogging by me in January that touches on the Paul media blackout. My forthcoming book, Ron Paul's Revolution.