Posted on 09/28/2015 8:57:57 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A year ago, if you had asked me whether Chris Christie, Scott Walker, or Rand Paul would be the last man standing of those three, I would have told you Rand. Christie would surely drop out early, done in by Bridgegate and his sheer RINO-ness. Walker was a serious threat to win, but there was a real chance that his voters would be gobbled up by more talented center-right and conservative retail politicians like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Paul, however, had his own niche. Libertarians are a smallish minority of the GOP but even a smallish minority can be a force in the early states when the field’s divided among many candidates, as Rand’s dad could tell you. There was reason to think he would inherit the lion’s share of Ron’s support in Iowa and New Hampshire while adding some “conservatarian” votes from mainstream Republicans who want something different in the next nominee. It wasn’t hard to imagine him winning 20-25 percent in both states.
He’s at 2.4 percent in RCP’s average of national polling and may well be the next domino to fall, especially with Republicans pressuring him to help them hold onto the Senate by dropping out soon and defending his seat. What happened?
One unnamed New Hampshire Republican told the Beltway publication that Paul’s “campaign (reeks) of the same stench of death that surrounded the Perry and Walker efforts before their demise.”…
It has been death by a thousand cuts for Paul’s campaign: reports of staff infighting, the federal indictments of two longtime aides, lackluster fundraising, the improbable and unpredictable rise of Donald Trump, and a Republican Party that appears to be returning to its roots on foreign policy…
The third-quarter fundraising period ends Wednesday, and one of the biggest questions will be whether Paul has raised enough money to continue his quest.
Paul’s campaign has spent the last few days feverishly sending fundraising emails, begging for contributions to keep Paul’s leaky ship afloat.
I can buy that the GOP is more interventionist today than it was in 2012, when Ron Paul nearly won Iowa and finished second to Mitt Romney in New Hampshire with nearly 23 percent of the vote. I can’t buy that it’s so much more interventionist, the rise of ISIS notwithstanding, that it would drop Rand Paul from Ron’s numbers to low single digits in the polls. I think that decline is a function of my initial impression about Rand being wrong: It turns out he doesn’t really have “his own niche” in the race. Paul, as I said, was trying to build a coalition of libertarians, “conservatarians,” and more generally anti-establishment Republicans and independents who are tired of politics as usual. Ted Cruz ate up most of the “conservatarian” vote, I think, by giving mainstream righties who like Rand a small-government alternative minus the kookiness and isolationist pedigree that conservatives never liked about Ron Paul. Rand, meanwhile, forfeited some of his father’s libertarian base by simply being too mainstream on certain issues, particularly issues related to foreign policy. One obvious flashpoint was the Iran deal. Ron supported that, as you’d expect him to; any diplomacy that averts war, if only in the short- to medium-term, is apt to be cheered as a victory by isolationists. Rand opposed the deal, however, because it didn’t demand proof of denuclearization before granting sanctions relief. Rand also signed Tom Cotton’s open letter to Iran warning them that any deal with the U.S. would cease to be binding until it had been approved by Congress — a letter denounced by Ron Paul as designed to “stop peace.” I think a lot of libertarian Ron Paul fans looked at that, along with Rand’s slipperiness on various other foreign policy questions, and decided that he couldn’t be trusted as president to resist interventionists.
Ultimately, though, it may have been Trump who did Paul the most damage by siphoning off all the Republican and indies who were looking for an outsider to “shake up the system” as president. Go look at the polls in New Hampshire for Rand before and after Trump got into the race. Throughout April, May, and June, he was consistently in double digits there; the growing field knocked him down to nine points or so by mid-June, but that’s still a respectable early figure. Six weeks later, though, as Trumpmania took off and Trump soared in the polls, he was in the low single digits and has never recovered, landing at just three percent in the latest poll taken there. The debates haven’t been good for him either, as you can see here in HuffPo’s tracker of his favorable rating:
He was already 10 points underwater on average by the time of the first debate on August 6th. Since then he’s slipped another three points, likely due to a combo of him going after the newly popular Trump and getting into a high-profile fight with Christie over the NSA. My sense of the GOPers and indies who like Trump is that they’re emphatically not isolationists; Trump likes to describe himself as “militaristic” and boasts, as part of his “Make America Great Again” message, that he’ll make the military bigger and better than ever as president. The implication from his comments about going into Iraq and Syria and taking the oil controlled by ISIS is that the U.S. will start showing people who’s boss again once President Trump is in command. That’s the opposite of the Paul approach to foreign policy, something the debates have highlighted. Between Cruz, Trump, and disaffection on both sides — libertarians and Make-America-Great-Again-ers — Paul’s left with basically no voters. How much longer can he go on?
Seems likely, as he’s actually probably got some expenses that he won’t have the money to pay. It’s hard to imagine that the entire Linda Graham Campaign Headquarters couldn’t fit in a reasonably large closet. Same for those other 0%’ers...
The article is correct in that Trump did him in. Rand’s been running around trying to assemble a Coalition of the Fed Up and that was the right thing to do, it’s just that he lost 90% of them in the first minute of the first debate when Trump refused to take the pledge. The true rogue candidate had emerged!
He should. I would give a snowball a better chance of survival in hell than I would give Rand being nominated for President.
Can he take Mitch with him and head back to KY when he goes?
I love it when ( with God’s help, prayers ) a plan comes together.
Looks like everything is going according to the plan.
The naysayers won’t know what happen when ( God willing ) Ted Cruz takes the oath of office in January 2017.
What a nice thought!
:-)
Buh, Bye Rand.
Need to take a few others with you.... That lame brain Grahamnesty for one. Others are Christie, Kasich, Snarly Figorina, Yebbie, Rubio, Jindal, Huckaby, and Santorum.
Amen. Waiting for the Trump bubble to burst.
Cruz is my first choice.
He’s so hated by the GOPe they’d probably do what they did in Mississippi and put out street money to defeat him.
I think we’re looking at a Trump vs. Jeb choice. Those are the only two with the money to go the distance.
Remember there’s a huge multi-state primary coming up fairly early. That’s meant to separate the conservatives from any momentum and kill candidates without a huge war chest going in.
Did he ever solve the problem of running for the Senate and for president in Kentucky at the same time?
Yes, he somehow finagled a caucus instead of a primary. Cost him $250,000.
Not if his father is any guide. Ron kept campaigning in every state, even after McCain, then Romney, had sown up their respective nominations.
Everything is in God’s hands, we very well may see a few surprises.
Don’t count Ted Cruz out, he very well may surprise you.
Snowwhite and the seven dwarfs.
Could be. Will be watching.
Meanwhile, Harpo needs to go! Paul laid a big egg. He needs to exit.
As does Jindal. And the gay dude. Graham.
Plus the village idiot they picked up along the way
With or without The Donald Rand was destined to go nowhere just like his Daddy.
Even as a longtime Cruz supporter I don’t know how you can see that happening at this point. Ted just doesn’t have the support OR the money for the long haul.
Too bad! I hope it is not true. Senator Paul has added some very important dimensions to the debate issues (personal privacy, debt control, behavior of the Federal Reserve, abortion). In my opinion he has been thoughtful, inventive, and skillfully expressive. Whether he stays in the presidential race or not, I certainly hope that we hold onto his voice in DC. He is a powerful resource for new ideas.
No. He is too arrogant to do that.
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