Trailing in the polls and no longer the “most interesting man in politics,” Rand Paul is defending his viability in the Republican presidential primary by promoting the strength of his campaign’s voter turnout operation.
In a telephone interview from Iowa that was pitched by the Paul campaign, the Kentucky senator argued that public opinion surveys in the Hawkeye State and New Hampshire are vastly underestimating his strength in the upcoming first two contests on the primary calendar. What is the current data missing? A grassroots ground game that Paul believes far outpaces the competition, anchored by 1,000 Iowa precinct captains and a 500-member leadership team in the Granite State.
“We could well be the leader in organization and I think that is underreported,” Paul told the Washington Examiner on Friday. “I wouldn’t be in this race if I didn’t think we had a chance to win.”
“The big thing the polls are missing is the infrastructure that’s been put in place,” A.J. Spiker, a senior Paul advisor in Iowa and former chairman of the state party there, added, in a separate telephone interview.
Paul is running seventh, with 3 percent, in the RealClearPolitics average of national GOP primary polls; he’s running ninth, with 2 percent, in Iowa; and ninth, with 3.8 percent, in New Hampshire. Viewed as a top tier candidate when the race got underway last year, Paul has slowly faded. For the first time, he even appears in danger of failing to qualify for Thursday’s prime time debate in South Carolina, hosted by Fox Business Network.
Paul has struggled to break through in a crowded and competitive field, in a campaign that has been dominated by national security and voters’ fears of more domestic terrorist attacks. Her is currently ranked sixth in the Examiner’s power rankings.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the Iowa frontrunner, has made a huge play to steal away Paul’s base of libertarian leaning Republicans (liberty voters, for short.) And with the rise of the Islamic State and a belligerent Russia, Paul’s noninterventionist foreign policy — derided as isolationist by some opponents — hasn’t sold as well as it did for his father, former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, when he ran for president four years ago.
But Paul and his senior aides say that these are myths peddled by his competitors and picked up by the political media. The senator insists that heightened concerns about national security actually boost his candidacy, and completely dismisses the notion that Cruz has outflanked him with the kind of libertarians who flocked to his father. Combined with the undervaluing of his get-out-the-vote apparatus, Paul predicted there would be many surprised pundits once the voting begins next month.
“Caucuses are notoriously harder to poll,” he said. “We think we have a great opportunity and all we’re asking is for people not to pre-judge the race.”
Spiker, who advised Ron Paul in 2012, said the former congressman fielded only around 300 precinct captains in that race, but finished a close third, just 3 percentage points behind Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, who practically tied for first place with 24.6 percent of the vote (Santorum won by a few dozen votes.) That’s among the reasons why he feels so confident that Rand Paul’s 1,000 precincts captains will translate into votes on the night of Feb. 1, when the caucuses are held.
Another is that the later date for holding the caucuses, compared to four years ago, means that Iowa’s colleges and universities are in session. Paul has long cultivated a relationship with younger voters, and his campaign has set the goal of attracting 10,000 Paul-supporting university students to the caucuses. Unlike a traditional primary, caucuses are lower turnout and tend to be dominated by committed political activists, and the Paul campaign believes that its grassroots-oriented campagn will flourish in this environments.
“We think we have the best ground game in Iowa,” Spiker said.
