Rand Paul’s latest effort at distinguishing himself from the rest of the 2016 field: shunning New Hampshire for the younger, hipper crowd at the South by Southwest conference in Austin.
“People keep asking me: Why are you in Texas and not in New Hampshire?” Paul told Bloomberg News. “Well, because I think if you want talent you’ve got to go to where the talent is.”
In Austin, Paul dubbed his target audience the “leave-me-alone coalition.”
“It’s not just that you’re into tech that makes you open to our message, it’s if you’re part of the leave-me-alone coalition,” he told his audience at the conference, during an interview with Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith. “The leave-me-alone coalition thinks that government doesn’t know everything, that government really shouldn’t be telling us what to do, for the most part, and that we want to be left alone, whether it’s our economic lives our our personal lives.”
And, to prove his tech street cred, he hosted a Twitter Q&A:
.@SCpundit I’m a constitutional conservative. Libertarianish. Have a foot in both camps. #randsxsw
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) March 15, 2015
Took some selfies:
Excited @SenRandPaul is promoting liberty & freedom in Austin with the launching of Liberty Action Texas! #RandSXSW pic.twitter.com/FEt6QKrREM
— Ryan (@mrpak95) March 15, 2015
and touted his Snapchat game: “I do Snapchat,” he said. “We’re tying to get new people engaged, and when you look at Snapchat’s audience, you know it’s the biggest 18-24 year-old audience. These are new young voters.”
He made an effort to draw explicit contrasts between himself and the rest of the Republican Party, particularly where surveillance is concerned.
“I’m the only candidate who thinks that the NSA program on bulk collection of your phone records should be shut down,” he said. “So, for example, if any of the people who like that look online for an article that says the NSA shouldn’t be doing that, it may well be that they see an ad from us, and that’s the way the Internet works, is liking and tagging your ideas to other ideas out there that people are interested in.”
Paul made it clear that he believes he appeals to a particular, niche crowd that the GOP is otherwise missing. “I think if you have something to say that is unique, that you can find other people that may agree with that unique message,” he said. “So, I’m trying to find—and I think you’re a potential voter in Texas that might be registered as a Democrat, might be an independent or a Republican, but I think you might be coming our way, I think there are distinctive characteristics about someone who listens to the message that I’m presenting that’s maybe completely different than the other nine candidates that might run on the Republican side.”
