...at least not to the AP:

Romney did better among more conservative voters, while McCain and Paul each got about one in five moderates, who made up about 20 percent of the electorate.

OK, what kind of a "moderate" would vote for Ron Paul? I can't think of any position that he takes that could be considered "moderate." He's what most people would call an extremist^*. If someone called themselves a "moderate," or someone whom the AP would call a "moderate" would vote for Ron Paul then the word has no meaning whatsoever.

And frankly, I find people who call themselves "moderate" to generally be people with no firm or coherent political principles whatsoever. All it really means is that they are neither "liberal" or conservative, so the media types find them difficult to pigeonhole. And given the large number of possibilities of positions one can have without being in either of those media pigeonholes, that means that we can't draw any conclusions whatsoever about them. We need a different word for such people than "moderate."

* Not that there's anything wrong with that--so am I, on many issues. I'm just (as I think that Glenn Reynolds once said of himself) an eclectic one.

I thought anyone who didn't vote for a Democrat was an extremist to the AP, or more to the point, to the majority of the American MSM.

Reminds me of when Jesse Ventura claimed to be a moderate because he was conservative on fiscal issues and liberal on social issues. Sadly, the interviewer let that one go by without challenge.

McCain is doing better than he was in 2000 now that the conservative vote is split between several candidates.

As an aside,

And frankly, I find people who call themselves "moderate" to generally be people with no firm or coherent political principles whatsoever.

So what're the benefits of political principles? As far as I can tell, it just means you handicap yourself when you try to get what you want politically. The single issue voters are a good example.

Thinking about it, cheap political tricks like bashing the rich or "do it for the kids" work in part because a lot of people just go with whatever sounds plausible and is placed in front of them. So if some political faction were to gain a propaganda edge, these people would align with that faction because that is what they see.

That line about "that word doesn't mean what you think it means" seems instructive. If you're for
Ron Paul, you think that we deserved 9/11 because
of the US troops on Saudi soil (when the reality
is we kept Saddam from razing every Wahhabi mosque
between Dhrahran & Jiddah, and dispossesing the
Hadramauti and Ilkwan retainers to the Sauds)the Civil War was a mistake;we could live with a half free, half servant society, like 1877-1964. An unlikely recipe for success.

Thinking about it, cheap political tricks like bashing the rich or "do it for the kids" work in part because a lot of people just go with whatever sounds plausible and is placed in front of them.

That's sometimes true. But there are also times when cheap political tricks work because they speak the truth, cheap though they may be. For instance, the Democrats had Graeme Frost explain that children with severe illnesses deserve extended medical care, whether or not their parents can afford it. That was certainly a "do it for the children" message. One that left most Americans persuaded.

In this case conservatives responded with their own bash-the-rich tactic --- by bashing the Frosts. That too was a cheap political trick. It didn't work because it was false.

Jim, whether or not you're right that the Frosts' example argued that "children with severe illnesses deserve extended medical care, whether or not their parents can afford it" is irrelevant. It's irrelevant because it has nothing to do with whether or not the expansion of SCHIP was a good idea. See, there's a difference between statements like "all injured kids should get medical care," that everyone can get behind, and statements like "because injured kids deserve medical care, SCHIP should be expanded," that are debatable.