Free Staters' Impact on the New Hampshire Primary: A Statistical Analysis

by Jason Sorens

The Free State Project was founded on the idea that a critical mass of dedicated activists could wield political influence out of all proportion to their numbers, especially if they had good ideas that appealed to the interests and sympathies of the majority of the population. I made some attempts to quantify that influence through voter-activist ratios drawn from different but arguably comparable contexts. In the more recent study, I argued that attaining 1% of the local population constituted a critical mass.

Until now, however, we had no direct evidence about how many Free Staters would be needed to achieve political victories in New Hampshire. The recent New Hampshire presidential primary, coming now with well over 500 Free Staters in the state, affords us the first opportunity to examine our prospects with hard evidence. In this election, there was one reasonably libertarian presidential candidate running in a statewide race: Ron Paul. While not all Free Staters supported Ron Paul's candidacy, I think it is fair to say that he was far more popular among Free Staters than any other candidate, particularly before the newsletters revelations that broke on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

My method is to examine how the ratio of Free Staters to Republican primary voters in each town affected Ron Paul's percentage of the vote in those towns, by using regression analysis. This method vastly understates the true influence of Free Staters on the election, because it is unrealistic to assume that Free Staters' primary influence on the election was solely within their own towns. However, it is not possible to assess Free Staters' influences on the state as a whole directly. We can note that according to ronpaulgraphs.com, a higher percentage of the New Hampshire population has donated to Ron Paul than of any other state, and we can also note that Ron Paul's finish in New Hampshire, 8% of the vote, is double what he has consistently polled in the rest of the country. Notwithstanding these encouraging figures, we cannot know to what degree they are attributable to the efforts of Free Staters rather than to the state's pre-existing libertarian base.

Before reporting the results of the regression analysis, I should mention a few interesting town results. Among towns with a population above 500, Ron Paul's best results were in Richmond (35.5%), which he won, Wentworth (24.2%), and Grafton (23.2%). All three towns have some Free Staters; in fact, FSP participants represent 0.9% of the population of Grafton, close to the critical 1.0% mark. I think it's fair to say that if Ron Paul were perceived as having a shot at winning the nomination or even the state's primary, his numbers would have been higher in every town, because many New Hampshire voters who liked Paul appear to have voted tactically for another candidate (more on this below).

The main result from the regression analysis is that every additional Free Stater per 100 Republican primary voters resulted in approximately 2.5 percentage points improvement in Ron Paul's share of the vote in that town. Thus, in Grafton, Free Staters represented 4% of Republican primary voters (we don't know that they all voted, or voted Republican, or even supported Ron Paul, of course), and the model predicts that if no Free Staters lived in Grafton, Ron Paul would have gotten 13% of the vote, instead of 23% (23-0.4*2.5). The margin of error of the estimated "FSP effect" is about 1.0. What that means that we definitely know that Free Staters influenced the election beyond their own votes. If we assume that, say, 75% of Free Staters voted for Ron Paul, then the 2.5 figure means that the average Free Stater Ron Paul supporter brought along two and a half neighbors to support Ron Paul as well (2.5/0.75-0.75), and they definitely brought along at least one neighbor (1.5/0.75-0.75), and could have brought along as many as four (3.5/0.75-0.75). As I mentioned above, these are only the effects that Free Staters had in their own towns. (For technical details, see the end of this essay.)

I also looked at the effects of New Hampshire "Pioneers" on the Ron Paul vote. Pioneers are New Hampshire residents who sign up on our website stating that they support the goals of the Project. They are not counted in our Participants count because they didn't have to move. I find that the percentage of Pioneers in each town has a weaker effect on Ron Paul's vote share, about 1.6 instead of 2.5. One could draw the conclusion that Pioneers, freedom supporters who did not move into the state under the auspices of the Free State Project, were less effective activists in this election than Participants who either moved into the state or signed up for the FSP before we chose New Hampshire, but another possibility is that Pioneers were as a group less likely to support Ron Paul than were Participants.

The regression results yield some other interesting insights into why Paul lost the election. I find that average home value from the Census, percentage of the town's population that lives in an urban area, per capita income in the town, and seasonal vacancy rates (proxying importance of the tourism industry in the town) are all strongly negatively correlated with Ron Paul support. In other words, those parts of the state that are doing well economically did not support Ron Paul. Paul did better in poor, rural areas without a large tourism industry.

These results match up well with exit poll results that show that Paul did best among those with incomes under $30,000 and worst among those with incomes over $100,000, better among those without a college degree than college grads, and far better among those "very worried about the economy" than those with other opinions.

In other words, Paul appealed to voters who felt very economically insecure. It seems highly plausible that the reason for this was that New Hampshire voters perceived Paul as an economic isolationist, ready to shut down international trade and immigration. The idea that Paul is basically a Buchananite with libertarian rhetoric is a common perception (misperception?) among supporters of other candidates with whom I have had contact. Since New Hampshire is a dynamic, open state with an international seaport and a border with Canada, protectionism doesn't sell in New Hampshire - at least, not any longer. The wealthy and well-educated presumably viewed Paul's proposals for a border wall and withdrawal from the WTO and NAFTA with alarm, even though Paul insists that he supports unilateral free trade.

So one reason Ron Paul lost New Hampshire is that his noninterventionist rhetoric has at times painted him as an isolationist. He has failed to stress his support for a dynamic international economy. (For what it's worth, I personally disagree with his stances on immigration and international trade agreements.)

Another reason Paul lost was tactical voting. New Hampshire voters were far more likely to oppose the war and be angry at the Bush Administration than had been Iowa voters. But Paul did worse, because the exit polls show these voters going to McCain. 49% of voters with a "somewhat favorable" opinion of Paul voted for McCain, and only 3% for Paul himself! McCain, who says he is willing to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 years, did far better among voters who oppose the Iraq war than among those who support it! Part of the reason for the results has to be simple voter ignorance, but part of it also has to do with the fact that the race was perceived as a battle among McCain, Romney, and Huckabee, and N.H. voters chose the candidate they thought most likely to change the Bush Administration's policies.

Finally, Ron Paul did worse than he might have otherwise because of the huge turnout. He actually received about 6,500 more votes in New Hampshire than in Iowa, and New Hampshire has fewer than half the eligible voters of Iowa! Had turnout in Iowa been at New Hampshire levels, I suspect Paul would have gotten less than 8% in Iowa, given that Ron Paul supporters are more passionate about their candidate than are supporters of other candidates (hence all the straw poll victories). One really can't directly compare results from caucuses, which have low turnout, to results from primaries, which have higher turnout.

In conclusion, the data show that Free Staters, most of whom have only moved to their location within the last year or two, have already begun to persuade their neighbors to vote for libertarian candidates. It will be interesting to see how their numbers affect the results when there is a statewide election involving a freedom-friendly candidate who actually has a chance of winning.

(Technical Appendix. Regressions are Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions with robust standard errors of Ron Paul's percentage of the vote on Free State Project Participants as a percentage of the Republican primary vote, rural population percentage from the Census, and the natural logarithm of median home value from the Census. Each town is an observation, and each observation was weighted by the total number of Republican primary votes from the town (i.e., bigger towns "count more" in the regression). A few towns had no votes for Ron Paul, creating a corner solution in the data. Tobit regression did not change the results appreciably. Adding all of the following control variables also did not change the results appreciably: farm population percentage, per capita income*, percentage of population on public assistance, seasonal vacancy rate*, other vacancy rate*, median rent, median real estate taxes, 2004 percentage of the vote for Craig Benson, and a dummy variable for college towns. [* Indicates statistically significant.] Adding Free State Pioneers as a percentage of the vote caused both "Free Stater variables" to lose statistical significance, marginally, because of high collinearity between the two, but the coefficient estimate on the FSP Participants variable remained stable.)

Evan Nappen Profile in BLADE Magazine

This profile of the FSP's very own Evan Nappen appears in the August 2007 issue of BLADE Magazine! The article is not available on line, but the publisher has provided us with the magazine pages in PDF format.

For information on how to subscribe to BLADE, contact the magazine c/o F+W/Krause Publications 700 E. State St Iola, WI 54990-0001 877.485.6426 (toll free) www.blademag.com

Read Evan's first BLADE article about the FSP Porcupine Buck Knife. [img_assist|nid=1627|desc=FSP Buck Knife|link=popup|align=left|width=240|height=62] There are still some knives left in the FSP Store!

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Web 2.0 and Virtual Movements

NOTE: The opinions and commentary expressed in this essay are those of the author and are an exercise of free speech. They do not necessarily represent the views of Free State Project Inc., its Directors, its Officers, or its Participants.

1. Evolution from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0

The buzzword Web 2.0 refers to certain modern (as of the year 2004, when O'Reilly Media first coined the term) web technologies and applications that significantly change the way people use the web. The term is fuzzy but useful, as it describes a phenomenon that has broken out of the technology journals to make daily headlines in the business press. Where Web 1.0 (and Bubble 1.0) was all about unidirectional 1-to-N e-commerce, Web 2.0 is about bidirectional N-to-N sharing. Look at almost any commonly cited Web 2.0 site (e.g. Tim O'Reilly's examples of eBay, craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball, Adsense, and Flickr), and in each case the user is an active contributor, not a passive consumer. Indeed, ordinary users are the only contributors—there is no central provision of content! To O'Reilly's list we could now add Youtube (a content-sharing site like Flickr, but for video), social networking sites (LinkedIn, MySpace, Classmates, Facebook, Friendster, Xing, Meetup, and Tagged), dating sites, project-worker-matching sites (Elance), journals and blogs (LiveJournal, Blogger), and, most recently, contribution sites (PledgeBank and Chipin). In all cases, the site provides only infrastructure—users publish the content.

Whereas the value (connections) of a traditional 1-to-N network rises linearly with N, the value of a network where everyone can publish to everyone else rises with N squared (the network effect). Web 2.0 changes not only the mathematics, but the roles of publisher and consumer. In Web 1.0 we celebrated the ability of "anyone" to publish, but the reality was that few people could. The Web 2.0 publishing process has been made so easy that truly anyone can be heard, if they can make their voice audible over the din. In Web 1.0 it was the publisher who benefited directly from an increased network, but today it is the consumer.

Effect of adding a member to a hierarchical network	Effect of adding a member to an peer-to-peer network

2. Features of Web 2.0 Sites

Web 2.0 sites share a few defining characteristics:

1. Users create the content (in fact, they may be the content)
2. Users create a personal profile that provides their identity to the community
3. Users benefit from improved interface technology, especially AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)

Web 2.0 is all about the user. What motivates users to publish content? As in other areas of life, people are motivated to contribute for:

1. Intrinsic benefit: At eBay or a dating site, users post their wares (e.g. themselves)
2. Payment: Users may be paid for their content-publishing efforts, but it is a small minority of bloggers who collect money. Payment is rarely the first reason.
3. Social contact: Users enjoy the contact and camaraderie of participating in a community.
4. Reputation: Volunteers contribute content for the same reasons they contribute to charitable efforts in general—maybe altruistically without any expectation of immediate payoff, but in the hopes that their generous contributions will be noted and remembered by the community.

Key to the success of a Web 2.0 site is the personal profile. The profile is a sort of mini home page that represents the user in the community, displaying various times of information, e.g. demographics, interests, skills, and affiliations. Profiles allow users to associate into groups on the basis of interests or demographics of interest. If the profile clearly displays users’ contributions (e.g. donations or content like photographs, reviews, and forum posts), they will be more motivated to contribute.

3. Virtual Movement Shared Hosting

A virtual movement (VM) is a special type of virtual community (VC) in which the common interest is the accomplishment of some social or political objective. There are two ways for a virtual movement to take advantage of Web 2.0 technology: work within an existing site or make its own site.

VCs predate the web (e.g. Lotus Notes), and their basic features are familiar to everyone. Yahoo Groups is currently the most common place to form a quick VC; its menu is a guide to the essential VC features:

Personal Profile (name, photo, interests, groups) Discussion Forum Calendar Events, Meetings, and Tasks) Photographs

Files Databases Links Polls

In a typical scenario, someone will create a new group (e.g. "People for the Ethical Treatment of Porcupines"), search for users with related interests (e.g. "animal-lovers"), and invite them to join. People join, engage in lively discussions, post their favorite photos, and maybe even arrange occasional meetings if enough members are located near the same city.

There are two advantages in creating a sub-community within a wider existing host community. First, the new community immediately inherits the technical infrastructure of the host. Second, the new community has a ready pool of potential members from which to recruit. For an infant organization this is all very important, and the larger the greater community the better.

VCs with any special needs (e.g. non-supported languages) quickly become frustrated by the limitations of the infrastructure, which is generally outside their ability to influence. The problem for a VM is, after discovering people of interest, forming links, and chatting, what next? Unless the greater community is growing rapidly, there are eventually no more new members to be recruited. The groups do not seem to *do* anything besides occasionally "meet up". The social networking (SN) web sites rarely offer functionality to support project coordination. This author must confess that he has accounts in most SN sites only because various friends have invited him to form links. More goal-oriented sites are now appearing, e.g. PledgeBank, ChipIn, and Facebook's new Cause function. However, the former two are narrow in focus, and better off as widgets placed on others' sites, while the latter is limited to non-profit US organizations with 501(c)(3) status. Eventually a successful VM will reach a point when it needs to host its own web site. It will almost certainly maintain representational outposts at each of the major SN sites, but the bulk of activity will shift to the internal site.

4 Virtual Movement Self-Hosting

As with all other software decisions, there are three options for creating one’s own VC: make, buy, and share. Starting from zero to make a full-featured VC with the extensive above-described functionality is a daunting task that few organizations would undertake. The required personnel, budget, and time to achieve it would be simply unfeasible. Most organizations would at least acquire the primary VC pieces (e.g. the discussion forum) and build on or integrate them. Commercial VC platforms exist, but they are generally purchased by mature organizations with financial means. Most VCs on the web are built on open-source software (OSS) that has two key features: it is free of charge, and developers are free to change and add to the code.

The most common VC platforms have been OSS discussion forums (a.k.a. bulletin boards), e.g. YaBB (now SMF). Discussion forums provide the bare VC essentials: personal profiles and message posting. Users can stretch the posting mechanism to contribute other forms of content (e.g. photos and event announcements), though these usually become quickly buried.

In parallel with the evolution of web-based discussion forums, there appeared on the scene open-source web content management systems (CMS). As web sites grew in size and number of contributors, tools became necessary to management them. CMS products store content in a database and provide several typical features:

• Role-based access control
• Workflow (author, edit, approve)
• Revision control
• Authoring tools for non-web-developers
• Attribution of content to the author
• Categorization via complex taxonomies
• Navigation and search
• Automatic generation of content, e.g. common headers, footers, and sidebars

Such features make a CMS ideal for the creation of a virtual library of articles or even books. Content is both easy to create and easy to find.

Modern web CMS products have evolved to provide additional features far beyond the basics:

• Generalized notion of “content” (e.g. article, discussion forum post, images, calendar events)
• Ability to completely change the look and feel via "themes" or "skins"
• Large number of contributors (with wikis being the extreme case)
• Multiple languages
• Robust site security
• RSS news feeds, both in and out
• API for modular extensions
• Large number of third-party modules providing a rich and unpredictable array of functionality
• Large distributed developer community

Modern OSS CMS products are now powerful virtual-community platforms that

• distill best practices from multiple developers
• enable developers to build sites with less effort using ready-made components
• enable developers to focus on interesting new functionality, not the basic plumbing
• assure customers of a known product with future support
• increase a developer's motivation to share contributions
• increase the chance that a developer can re-use his knowledge on future projects with other teams

The above OSS features support failing intelligently. Failure can lead to success if you

1. Fail quickly (don’t waste time, and don’t delay admitting failure)
2. Learn from the experience
3. Salvage some of your work
4. Don’t give up

Even if a web project fails, the experience, tools, and custom code developed can be reused if this is planned for in advance. Failure is tragic when a large amount time, energy, and money are expended and the result is thrown away and forgotten.

5. Drupal

From the market’s many OSS CMS products emerge clear winners. Robust, full-featured, extensible, and elegant, these platforms represent the best of the best. As of this writing, one hears most often about three CMS products: Joomla, Plone, and Drupal. Joomla is known to be the easiest and prettiest out of the box, but it is harder to modify. Joomla is thus favored by novice web administrators, and is the most popular. Where Joomla is based on PHP, Plone runs on Zope and Python; it is highly respected, but even experienced programmers need some time to learn to develop on it. A good compromise between out-of-the box functionality and flexibility is Drupal. Like Joomla, it is based on PHP.

5.1 Drupal API

The well-built Drupal API contains a library of hundreds of functions. Unlike Joomla, Drupal allows modules to interact. For example, one can create an e-commerce item out of any content item ("node"), assign any node a date to create a calendar event, and assign any node a location to that can be found by geographic functions.

Drupal Components

• Module system (Drupal hooks)
• Database abstraction layer
• Menu system
• Form generation
• File upload system
• Search system
• Node access system
• Theme system

5.2 Drupal Modules

Drupal has literally hundreds of modules. It would be impossible to list them all here, let alone describe them, but below are the number of modules in each category:

3rd party integration (156) Administration (131) CCK (60) Commerce / advertising (65) Community (98) Content (229) Content display (235) Developer (68) Evaluation/rating (32) Event (28) File management (32) Filters/editors (92) Import/export (32) Javascript Utilities (4)

Location (19) Mail (57) Media (81) Multilingual (13) Organic Groups (29) Paging (14) Security (35) Syndication (47) Taxonomy (76) Theme related (51) User access/authentication (83) User management (57) Utility (205) Views (42)

Drupal’s architects had no illusions that a CMS could possibly be fully ready out of the box, and be all things to all people. Drupal was thus designed to be easily extensible. In that it is often described not as a CMS, but a content management framework. Developers with unique needs are encouraged to package their extensions as a module, and contribute it to the Drupal community if it will be of interest to others.

Some modules of note:

• CCK and Views: these enable developers to create new content types and display them in lists.
• Taxonomy: allows content to be categorized by multiple hierarchies of terms ("taxonomies"), which can then be used in URLs to display related content.
• Organic Groups: enables the easy creation of groups of users with their own private content.
• Internationalization (i18n): Drupal offers modules for creating multi-language web sites, and this represents an area of active current development.
• RSS feeds: these can be generated from almost any mix of content, with not just one feed, but dozens for special interests.
• jQuery: Drupal comes with the JavaScript library jQuery, which on its home page is described as "a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages." jQuery is a boon to both novice and advanced programmers alike, shortening the learning curve of the former and providing a standard set of code for the latter.