Here at Irregular Times, we don’t believe in the agenda of the Republican Party or its presidential candidates, and we won’t sell a bumper sticker, button, shirt or other item in promotion of a Republican candidate until we find a Republican candidate whose vision we agree with. That hasn’t happened yet, and we aren’t holding our breath.

However, CafePress does offer a number of stickers, buttons, shirts and other thingamajigs in promotion of Republican party presidential candidates. Now that Cafepress is releasing sales statistics for the presidential candidates, we can see how sales have been trending for the Republican presidential candidates lately. The sale of items like bumper stickers, buttons, shirts and posters indicates a stronger commitment than a simple poll response because it involves the spending of money and because it results in a person’s public declaration of support for a candidate. The more strongly committed are more likely to caucus or to vote. As the 2008 presidential race quickly moves to a national scale, tracking strong commitment to presidential candidates at the national level becomes more important.

The following is the percent distribution of all 2008 GOP candidate sales sold by all CafePress in the past week of January 6 to January 12, 2008:

Last week, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was the runaway favorite among shoppers looking to show their committed support for a Republican presidential candidate, garnering 58.4% of all GOP candidate sales. Coming in a distant second was Ron Paul, with 24.6%. John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Duncan Hunter were much further back than those two, each accounting for less than 10% of all GOP presidential sticker sales.

If we pool sales of items supporting Democratic presidential candidates, Republican presidential candidates and third party candidates together, it becomes clear that there’s a lot more interest in expressing committed support for Democrats than for Republicans or third party candidates. Democratic candidates grabbed 61.1% of all presidential candidate sales on CafePress last week. Republican candidate sales accounted for 37.2% of presidential candidate sales, and third party candidates accounted for the remaining 1.7%.