Reno — Call 2008 the year of the great tumult, the year of the outsiders, the young, the tech-savvy who are changing American politics.

Although most of the attention, money and passion lie with the long saga of the Democratic presidential contest, Nevada’s state Republican convention here offered evidence of the ground shifting across the spectrum, with an actual earthquake Friday night serving as an apt symbol.

Rep. Ron Paul, a Republican with a libertarian’s heart, followed his second-place finish in Nevada’s January presidential caucus by out-organizing the state’s Republican establishment. In the process, the Paulites embarrassed the campaign of Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

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They seemed to make up more than half of the 1,300 or so state delegates to the convention. They won a key procedural vote on the rules, and their boisterous presence created significant delays, causing the convention chairman, Bob Beers, a state senator from Las Vegas, to recess the convention without selecting delegates to the national convention. The state convention is to resume at a later date.

Paul supporters occasionally shouted down the chairman, then rocked the convention with noise when Paul, their diminutive doctor icon, appeared to rally them.

The passion of the libertarians showed the sense of unrest of some grass roots Republicans following the party’s 2006 defeat and worrisome signs of another this year.

A surge in Democratic registrations has dealt Nevada Republicans a 50,000 voter deficit, while nationally, the GOP faces the biggest party identification gap to Democrats ever recorded by the Gallup polling organization.

Although it is largely papered over by the GOP establishment’s unifying behind McCain, party regulars are debating the future of the party, and especially whether to return to the small-government principles of the late Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate.

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