In 2014, Rand Paul was frequently leading in New Hampshire polls. Now he won’t even make it to the primary where his father finished second in 2012.
As late as last April, Paul was regularly in the double digits nationally. In last May’s Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll, he was leading or tied with every Republican currently in the race in Iowa (Scott Walker was the front-runner in the caucuses at the time).
The precise cause of Paul’s collapse will be hotly debated, especially in libertarian and paleoconservative circles. Some will point to him underperforming both his father’s Republican presidential campaigns and say he should have been more radical.
Others will say that once the Islamic State claimed its first American victims, a less interventionist foreign policy was going to be a tough sell to a Republican primary electorate and that Ted Cruz’s candidacy created too much competition for the Tea Party vote without telling conservatives anything they didn’t want to hear.
The Paul campaign set at least some of the blame at the foot of a certain reality TV star. “The outsized attention given to one outsider candidate really prevented [Paul] from spreading his message more than we anticipated,”Paul senior adviser Doug Stafford told reporters on conference call.
What is unmistakable is that Paul had hoped he could outperform his Iowa poll numbers with a strong ground game and an appeal to college students whose support the pollsters were missing. Unlike in 2012 or 2008, those students were in session rather than on break.
Paul ran ahead of Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina and the past two Iowa winners. But he actually did a little worse than the final Des Moines Register poll predicted and received only half Ben Carson’s share of the vote. The ground game couldn’t deliver, which didn’t bode well for future caucuses, and most of the candidates he did beat weren’t trying as hard to contest the state.
A February 2015 Liberty Iowa poll found that nearly 70 percent of Ron Paul’s delegates to the Iowa Republican State Convention were for Rand in 2016. Their second preference was Cruz, who made his own pitch to libertarian-leaning Republican voters, followed by Walker.
Ron Paul carried 14 counties in Iowa in 2012. This year, Donald Trump carried 9 of them and Cruz won 5. Both candidates have said the Iraq war was a mistake and are running on a less interventionist foreign policy than Marco Rubio, though Rand has been a persistent Trump critic.
Rand Paul did relatively well in the college-heavy counties, but nowhere nearly strong enough to break into the top tier. The student vote instead went heavily to Bernie Sanders in the closely contested Democratic caucus.
The younger Paul also was facing pressure back home in Kentucky to focus on his re-election bid to the Senate. Lexington Mayor Jim Gray has entered the race on the Democratic side. While Paul undoubtedly would have liked to make it to Kentucky’s presidential nominating contest, changed from a primary to a caucus at his behest, he would like another term in the Senate even more.
Paul was considered an early front-runner for the nomination. At least he outlasted Lindsey Graham. Some will ask if there ever was a “libertarian moment.” Moments come and go, and sometimes come again.
