He said UKIP had picked up protest votes that might previously have gone to the Lib Dems.
The first is that, before devolution, they got lots of protest votes.
ECONOMIST: Scottish and Welsh nationalism: Rats to the nats | The
He has plenty of money for advertising and is using it, and some may throw their support to him, if only as protest votes.
"A lot of Lib Dem votes were protest votes anyway and that is what we are picking up, " he told the BBC's Daily Politics.
Down south, they argue, the Conservatives gained from a splintering of the anti-Tory vote, as some ex-Lib Dems recorded protest votes with Labour or the Greens.
The progress of the Northern League, a natural recipient of protest votes, suggests that large numbers of voters were seeking refuge from the terrors of globalisation.
But he would have to pull off some exceptional coups in the next few primaries to convince people that he can win, that he can be the Republican candidate, rather than just the main repository for conservative protest votes.
The owners of companies have become increasingly concerned about what they see as excessive pay increases for directors, that are not justified by the performance of companies - and there has been a rise in the number of protest votes against remuneration practices at companies' annual meetings.
As he said to me yesterday, he is concerned that the current wave of protest votes against excessive executive pay could turn out to be a passing fad - and he therefore wants a constitutional change that would lead to a permanent transformation of big institutional shareholders into properly informed and engaged proprietors.
Factor-in the latest opinion polls suggesting a further turning-away from from the three biggest parties and you can see why UKIP and the Greens are being touted as the 'None of the Above' parties: the Liberal Democrats, so often beneficiaries of protest votes in the past, are now a party of government, so definitely 'One of the Above'!
Unimpressed, investors withheld 42% of votes for company directors in protest.
Among the interesting people I met were two independents who registered as Republicans to cast their votes for Jon Huntsman, to protest against a strain of conservatism they dislike.
In April Morgan Stanley and other disaffected investors, representing 28% of the shares in the New York Times Company, ostentatiously withheld their votes at the annual meeting, in protest at the falling share price of the paper under the control of the Ochs-Sulzberger family.
However, the protest vote over remuneration is an increase over last year, when 83 per cent of votes cast supported Apple's "say-on-pay" proposal.
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