Patrick Ruffini weighs in with his usual trenchant analysis of the current state of Presidential fundraising (think big picture), and what it means for the GOP the rest of this cycle.

Students of modern campaigning should digest the full post. Yet, I do have to quibble with one point in Ruffini's take. He says:

With all of this, it is increasingly difficult to control the battle space with TV advertising, mail, and phone calls. If 30% of your universe is reading Drudge, if 70% of your likely voters are seeking out YouTube clips of you, the impact of push media fades by comparison. Yes, the impressiveness of these figures ebbs in a general when low-information voters come in, but that only makes the cash cow that is your online network all the more important in generating resources for paid media when it matters.

Clearly the Internet is an incredibly important component of current political discourse. It plays a disproportionate effect in influencing traditional media outlets, as well as talk radio, and is ravenously consumed by political activists who likewise play a weighty role in elections.

Yet, even at that it is sometimes too easy for those of us embracing technology at all turns in modern discourse to forget that there are still significant swaths of the voting electorate, including in the primary season, who do not view the Internet as a primary source of political news (even if their chosen sources of TV and newspapers are influenced by it).

I discussed as much in this post referring to an interesting national study of 2006 voters by Pew as well as this post which included mention of primary polls in Iowa and South Carolina [the specific discussion is about halfway down the latter post, though regrettably the links to those state specific polls are now dead]. In all cases, the Internet was found to be a highly secondary source of political news for likely voters, even in the much watched and participated-in early state contests.

So, Ruffini most definitely has a point about the new fundraising paradigm in which the GOP must now operate, even as a McCain nomination presents challenges to reaching the traditional base of grassroots donors. Yet, in the midst of the appropriate call for adaptation, let us not forget how many voters - even in the primaries - are reached predominantly by non-Internet sources.