This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 12, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Ron Paul's appeal to first-time GOP voters and young people in general in Iowa and New Hampshire is hard to deny,

though it's not clear that the GOP is making much of an attempt to make those people

lifelong Republicans.

So says John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government.

There's a lot of data, but the one thing you notice is you thumbed through it is that

Ron Paul's voters in both Iowa and New Hampshire are significantly younger than others.

In both places, about half of his voters were under 30 years old.

Okay, what does that mean relative to the other candidates?

Well, it means, first of all, since most people, 70% are over 45, that means part of the reason why he's having problems.

But it does, I think, suggest something over the long term that might be good, which is that he has an attraction for younger voters. That was definitely a problem for the

GOP candidate in 2008. Also, Ron Paul sticks out from the data that people who are voting for the first time in a GOP primary

tended to be very strongly Paul voters.

So at the front end of the whole process, the GOP primary voters that are coming through the door as it were,

tended to go very strongly toward Ron Pollan that might have some implications down the line.

This is from MS NBC.

Remarkably self-described independence accounted for nearly half of all voters

Tuesday.

A piece of data which has implications for November.

Paul won 32% of independence,

with Romney getting 29% and Huntsman picking up 23%.

That's right.

...