By modern standards, the Paul campaign is barely a campaign. He raised just $640,000 in the first quarter, compared to Mitt Romney’s $23 million and Giuliani’s $16 million. He has made only one visit to each of the three early voting states, has no organized operation in Iowa or South Carolina, and boasts a national campaign staff of just six. But Paul’s supporters, who number in the untold thousands, are certainly making their virtual mark.

They have begun to dominate the Republican presidential race on the Internet, though there is no evidence yet that the buzz will translate at the polls. Paul’s campaign now has roughly twice as many YouTube subscribers (12,000) as Barack Obama, and more than twice as many as all the other Republican candidates combined. Paul regularly wins unscientific online polls, while barely causing a blip in the scientific offline ones. His name is among the most searched terms on Technorati, the blog search engine. Before his appearance on Maher’s show, online activists used the Web site Eventful.com to organize an impromptu rally for him outside the studio.

“The toothpaste is out of the tube,” says Kent Snyder, a former telecom executive who is chairman of the Paul campaign. Snyder helped manage Paul’s relatively insignificant 1988 White House run as the Libertarian Party candidate. Paul came in third in that election, with 431,499 votes, or .47 percent of the electorate, which was better than Lyndon LaRouche’s .03 percent. Back then, there was no way to easily organize national support on a shoestring budget. “We were doing faxes and phone trees,” Snyder says. Now Paul’s supporters are doing the work on their own, bombarding news organizations with demands that Paul get more coverage, setting up Web sites like RonPaulLibrary.org in honor of Paul’s writings, and laying the groundwork for an antiwar protest campaign in the spirit of Howard Dean, circa 2003.

Read it all: Ron Paul is blowing up real good | Salon News