What you and Rand Paul consider “obvious about how best to appeal to certain voters”, contradicts the GOP platform.
When the man running for president is running against the party platform almost 3 years before the election, I think we can assume that he opposes the party platform.
If you are opposed to “gay marriage” and anti-God, social liberalism, why would you campaign for the man running on them?
I just checked his website to find out about these liberal issues that you speak of. His platform seems pretty conservative to me.