Via the New York Times:
Wildly enthusiastic Ron Paul supporters, including busloads of college students, have been a visible presence at the Values Voters Summit in Washington, so no one was surprised when Mr. Paul won the conference’s annual straw poll of presidential preferences on Saturday.
All of the major Republican contenders spoke on Friday or Saturday at the conference, a pep rally for religious conservatives sponsored by the Family Research Council, the American Family Association and other conservative Christian groups and attended by 3,400 people. Of the 1,983 who voted, 37 percent chose Mr. Paul.
Not that this will help Paul secure the nomination, of course, but as the Times notes, both Rick Perry (8 percent) and Mitt Romney (4 percent) fared very poorly, coming in behind Herman Cain (23 percent) and Rick Santorum (16 percent). (Full results here.) The thing is, the Value Voters Summit is supposed to be a gather of religious and social conservatives. So what does it mean when a glibertarian like Ron Paul does so well? I hate to agree with the likes of Tony Perkins, but I think he's probably right:
This win is too fishy to matter: One would think Paul "a bit too libertarian for social conservatives," says Joseph Knippenberg at First Things. But Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council explained everything when he pointed out that the Paul camp apparently packed the vote with his amped up supporters. This kind of thing doesn't boost Paul's candidacy; it makes "the whole enterprise of straw polling" look dubious.
As Nate Silver pointed out, certain straw polls do offer some predictive power. But more often than not, they're just tools to be gamed and mean very little. The fact that Ron Paul can win a seemingly major one on what should be completely hostile turf, and the fact that he most certainly won't be the Republican nominee, is proof positive of that.