Rand Paul appears ready to risk a safe Republican Senate seat, and possibly Kentucky’s eight Electoral College votes, to satisfy his presidential ambitions.
The Kentucky senator is advancing a game plan to shift Kentucky’s 2016 nominating contest to a March caucus from the scheduled May statewide primary.
State law prohibits any candidate from appearing on the ballot twice. But if Kentucky Republicans moved to a caucus, Paul could compete for, and assuredly win, the commonwealth’s GOP presidential nominating delegates and re-nomination to his Senate seat.
Even if Paul solves that problem by the beginning of next year, however, Republicans in Kentucky and Washington could face the same dilemma in November 2016.
Paul is a leading contender in the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential field. If he were nominated, Kentucky law would preclude Paul from appearing twice on the general election ballot. That matter could go to court, and even Paul’s allies concede that a state or federal court might decide Kentucky law is paramount.
If that happened, Paul could be knocked off the state’s presidential ballot, jeopardizing otherwise guaranteed electoral votes for the GOP column. Or he could be disqualified from the Senate ballot and the state GOP blocked from installing a replacement nominee.
Such a decision would effectively forfeit a sure Republican Senate hold to the Democrats, possibly tilting the balance of power on Capitol Hill.
“We think [Paul’s] great and don’t want to do anything to dampen his enthusiasm,” Tom Watson, a member of the Kentucky Republican Party’s executive committee, said Thursday during a telephone interview. “But now that we have Sen. [Mitch] McConnell as majority leader we want to do everything we can to keep every seat that we can keep.”
Paul remains uniquely popular among Republican voters in Kentucky, and counts McConnell as a close political ally, giving his caucus proposal a decent chance of being accepted when the Kentucky GOP meets to vote on the matter March 7 in Bowling Green, the senator’s hometown.
In a Feb. 9 letter to the executive committee, Paul pitched a caucus as giving Kentucky Republicans more influence in the national primary and leveling the playing field for him with other candidates whose states allow them to appear on the ballot for both Congress and the White House. Paul doesn’t plan on offering a specific caucus scheme, but will instead ask the state party to create a committee to hammer out the details.
Paul announced in November that he was running for re-election even as he ramped up for an almost certain presidential bid. Although plenty of time remains for the senator to change course and drop either his bid for president or Senate, sources close to Paul say he intends to fulfill his commitment to appear on the May 2016 primary ballot for re-nomination to the Senate regardless of whether the Kentucky GOP embraces his caucus proposal.
If the plan is rejected, Paul is just as likely to run for president as he is now. But the senator would not appear on Kentucky’s May primary ballot for president and would not be eligible to compete for his home state’s GOP nominating delegates. After placing a request for comment with Paul’s political team, a spokesman forwarded to the Washington Examiner a copy of the senator’s letter to the state GOP executive committee.
“Moving up Kentucky’s Presidential primary election would also allow me to make a run for the nomination and seek re-election,” Paul wrote. “Seeking both is actually quite common. In the last Presidential election, Paul Ryan ran for Vice President and Congress at the same time. Although we were not successful in getting a Republican in the White House in 2012, we were able to keep Paul Ryan as a Republican leader in the House of Representatives.”
Republican critics of Paul’s approach to circumventing Kentucky election law have griped about the potential cost to the state party for running a caucus, it’s feasibility for counties with very few Republicans and how to ensure access by overseas military. But their central objection is to the legal uncertainty that would endanger Paul’s Senate seat and the Kentucky’s Electoral College votes if the senator emerges as the GOP 2016 nominee.
Kentucky is conservative in federal elections, but Democrats still control the state House of Representatives and the governor’s mansion. Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrat who challenged McConnell last year, is hardly going to go out of her way to help Republicans sort out any legal dilemma that might arise from Paul’s ascendance. Paul’s allies downplay the risks and chock up the warnings to sour grapes by political opponents.
They argue that Constitutional law and legal precedent make it a near certainty that the court would either rule state law unconstitutional and force Kentucky to permit Paul’s name to appear twice on the November ballot or render a decision that allows the state GOP to replace the senator with a new general election nominee on the grounds that the law should err on the side of allowing voters as many choices as possible.
“Senator Paul is asking us to level the playing field for him in Kentucky to allow him to seek the Presidency during his re-election for U.S. Senate,” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., wrote in an email sent to members of the Kentucky GOP executive committee on Wednesday. “I say level the playing field, because most states clearly allow for that. Kentucky actually probably does too, because they have an unconstitutional statute saying otherwise that has never been tested in court.”
