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Austin is a stronghold for Ron Paul campaign Mark Lisheron Famously, flagrantly liberal Austin has almost overnight become a crucial redoubt in a campaign to elect as president a libertarian Republican congressman from Lake Jackson. The strength of Ron Paul here is just another surprise in a campaign built almost entirely on the unexpected, delighting the candidate and confounding the experts. From the bursts of online political donations — nearly $11 million contributed by roughly 125,000 small donors — to the donors themselves — disaffected voters from both parties, idealistic political naifs, Constitutionalists (who believe in strict adherence to the Constitution) and anarchists — Paul's is the Keep Austin Weird campaign of this presidential election cycle. Unusual, certainly, by the standard set by two firmly entrenched political parties rigidly controlling their campaigns from the top down. But to the ardent supporters who have built an organization from the ground up, Ron Paul right now and right here in Austin makes perfect sense.
(Article continues below) "What better place for this to happen than here in Austin?" Paul Davis said. "Austin is a place for open-minded people." In May, Davis started a Ron Paul support group on the Web site www.meetup.com. In what might be the biggest of all of Ron Paul's pleasant surprises, supporters began almost from the start forming what are called meetup groups. Organizers use the sites to announce meetings and enlist volunteers to hand out campaign material or to paint and plant campaign signs. They also serve as an idea exchange that has led to several impromptu and very successful fundraising efforts for Paul. There are now more than 1,100 Ron Paul meetup groups nationwide, boasting membership exceeding 100,000. It is from these meetup groups that Paul has generated donations that put him on par with Republican John McCain and far ahead of any of the so-called second-tier candidates, though far behind the major Republican and Democratic candidates. The membership is the source of most of his volunteer work. The Austin meetup group, with 1,142 members, is the largest in the country. There's a much smaller University of Texas group, but the Austin organization is bigger than New York's, bigger than Chicago's, bigger than the meetup group for the entire state of Michigan. Organizing the group was Davis' first political act, inside or outside of a voting booth, he said. The story of Davis' political awakening is told again and again in the Paul campaign, in the stories of people who had dropped out of or had never been part of the political process. Davis is 39, a Marine Corps veteran of the Gulf War. He coordinates his group from a laptop in the kung fu and tai chi studio he runs on South Lamar Boulevard.
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