Democrats Pulling a ‘Ron Paul’ with Online Poll?

noneed4thneed of Century of the Common Iowan launched a new online poll last week to measure his readers’ support of Democratic presidential candidates.  He held them in the past, and the results were always unscientific but interesting to see.  Now that campaigns are taking Iowa blogs a bit more seriously, however, Iowa bloggers can’t assume that all voters are actually interested readers.

The poll launched on August 21st.  Keeping that date in mind, take a look at his traffic for the past 30 days:

Clearly, the right people noticed the poll at the right time, and certain campaigns began to direct their online supporters to Common Iowan to vote.  Which campaigns were those, you ask?  Look at the results (as of 5:40PM Monday):

I spent a few minutes searching, and I found where Richardson was sending voters from.  Dodd and Edwards also clearly sent people, although neither campaigns wrote official blog entries linking to Common Iowan between August 21 and 24, so their support may have been generated by their online communities themselves and not their campaign staff.

Had the Common Iowan poll included Ron Paul as an option, it would have been pretty interesting to see what happened.