At Gathering, Ron Paul Is No. 1 for 2012 (Published 2011)

WASHINGTON — With the Republican presidential campaign poised to open, conservative activists signaled on Saturday that they were unsettled over who should win the party’s nomination, indicating a wide-open race for the right to challenge President Obama.

For three days, prospective Republican presidential contenders delivered speeches at the Conservative Political Action Conference here, introducing themselves to influential figures who will help choose the nominee. The results of a straw poll on Saturday underscored the fluidity of the field.

Representative Ron Paul of Texas won the poll for the second year in a row, and Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, took second place. The results reflected the challenges that lie ahead for Republicans as they weigh arguments of electability and ideology and try to unite the party.

Mr. Paul received 30 percent of the vote, and Mr. Romney won 23 percent. The rest of the potential contenders finished in single digits, including Sarah Palin, who declined an invitation to speak here; she received support from only 3 percent of the poll’s voters.

Organizers said that more than 10,000 people from across the country attended the conference, but only 3,742 of them participated in the straw poll, the results of which offer little indication of which candidate will emerge to take on the president. The tepid showing of many of the candidates underscored the problems they face as they seek to introduce themselves to Republican primary voters. The conference is intended to allow candidates to test the themes of their prospective candidacies.

The people who attend the conference, which has been meeting in Washington for nearly four decades, are not representative of Republican primary voters. But nearly a dozen potential candidates still delivered speeches in hopes of building support.

Many of the potential contenders who are expected to announce their candidacy in the coming weeks fared poorly in the straw poll, including Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who received 5 percent, and Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, who got 4 percent.

Ms. Palin has not announced her intentions, but her supporters confirmed on Saturday that she had hired a veteran Republican adviser to run her political action committee and try to bring order to her political operation.

The adviser, Michael Glassner, who first worked with Ms. Palin during her 2008 vice-presidential campaign, will become Ms. Palin’s top political aide.

“We are very grateful that he is bringing his expertise to our enterprise,” Tim Crawford, the treasurer of SarahPAC, said.

Ms. Palin has long operated with a shoestring staff, with much of her political decisions made with her husband, Todd. Her political action committee already has several employees, but the line of authority inside the operation has been unclear to Republicans who have tried to reach out to Ms. Palin.

Mr. Glassner, who worked for the 1996 Republican presidential campaign of former Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, was hired to organize Ms. Palin’s political ventures. But the decision to bring him aboard is not necessarily a sign that she is moving closer to a presidential run, according to two Republicans who support Ms. Palin, but an indication that she is trying to get organized as she decides her future.

Lawsuit Over Video

Andrew Breitbart, the owner of several conservative Web sites, was served at the conference on Saturday with a lawsuit filed by Shirley Sherrod, the former Agriculture Department employee who lost her job last year over a video that Mr. Brietbart posted at his site biggovernment.com.

The video was selectively edited so that it appeared Ms. Sherrod was confessing she had discriminated against a farmer because he was white. In the suit, which was filed in Washington on Friday, Ms. Sherrod says the video has damaged her reputation and prevented her from continuing her work.

Mr. Breitbart said in a statement that he “categorically rejects the transparent effort to chill his constitutionally protected free speech.” SARAH WHEATON