For the first time in several weeks, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is celebrating his position in a presidential poll as opposed to challenging the attention paid to it.
The Republican presidential hopeful rose to fifth place with 5 percent support in a CNN/ORC poll released Tuesday, putting him ahead of businesswoman Carly Fiorina, who was second behind GOP front-runner Donald Trump in the same poll just last month, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has polled steadily in the middle of the field. Fiorina and Cruz now stand 1 percentage point behind Paul at 4 percent each.
At first glance, Paul’s 1-point jump may appear insignificant. But the Kentucky senator says it’s indicative of his unrivaled support among young voters and follows a positive trend he’s seen since the second Republican debate.
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“We’ve seen movement upwards ever since the second debate in our fundraising and our organizational ability and now we’re seeing a bit of it in this poll,” Paul told the Washington Examiner Tuesday. He noted that most polls have “underappreciated” his support among independent voters and youth.
The latest CNN/ORC poll offers no breakdown in percentage of support among millennials or respondents age 35-49. However, Paul is shown earning just 1 percent support among the “50 and older” bracket, leading his campaign to believe he must have scored well among younger voters to have risen to fifth place.
“Even in this poll, it doesn’t really separate out the youth in the poll because it was a small number,” Paul explained. “But it does tell you where we did in certain age brackets and by looking at that, we interpret it to mean we must have done extraordinarily well with those under 50 — maybe in the 20-25 percent range.”
Support from youth voters is sure to be welcome news for the ophthalmologist-turned-senator who spent much of last week touring nine separate college campuses in Iowa. He explained Tuesday that the Feb. 1 date of the Iowa caucuses should enable more college students to participate who, in past years, have been idle at home on Winter break.
“One of the interesting and unusual numbers is about 120,000 people caucus in Iowa and there’s actually about 120,000 college students in Iowa,” Paul told the Examiner. “Nobody thinks we can get all 120,000 out, but our goal is 10,000 and that’s about 10 percent of the college population.”
He added, “We’re at 3,000 now that have agreed to caucus for us and this is completely swept under the surface of what you’re seeing reported.”
Paul, who’s now eighth in the Washington Examiner’s presidential power rankings, also noted that by the time Feb. 1 approaches, he “fully expects neither [Donald] Trump, nor [Ben] Carson will be leading.”
“I think the polls go up and down quite a bit. We’re obviously glad that we’ve moved up, but they’re just sort of snapshots of people’s leanings, not how they’d like to vote,” Paul added, without sounding too eager.
