$views->render() does not display node_path
aha! turns out render() only produces data saved in the database, and node paths are not saved in the DB. So my solution was to grab the node id from the rendered view, use that to get the node paths, and created a new field with that path like so:

function theme_get_view_result($viewname) {
  // views_get_views_result($viewname) produces the same result as $view-&gt;result;
  // Im just showing that I tried both
 //return views_get_view_result($viewname);

  $view = views_get_view($viewname);
  if(!empty($view)){
    $view-&gt;preview();
    return $view-&gt;result;  
  }else{
    return 'empty';
  }
}

$blocks = theme_get_view_result('front_page_blog_blocks');
foreach($blocks as $k=&gt;$v)
{
  $node_path = drupal_lookup_path('alias','node/'.$blocks[$k]-&gt;nid);
  $blocks[$k]-&gt;node_path=$node_path;
}