Rand Paul was hustling to a TV hit on Fox News when security officials on hand stopped him.
It was October and Paul was in Boulder for the third Republican presidential debate. By the time he had arrived there, Paul’s support was already shrinking, the Islamic State was growing and Donald Trump, a man who had mocked Paul’s looks to an audience of 20 million, stood center stage. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be for a candidate who visibly relished his top-tier status throughout 2014. His senior advisers had landed in Boulder to find that Paul’s greenroom amounted to little more than a folding table and a toilet.
But getting stopped by the guards was insulting, and Paul was incredulous. He was a candidate for president, he told the security officers. They didn’t recognize him. They demanded credentials. He was a candidate, Paul said, according to a person close to Paul who is familiar with the exchange. Back and forth, it went until Paul was eventually let in.
Paul was steamed enough to confront Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. He thought Paul was joking. Paul informed him that, as a matter of fact, he wasn’t joking at all — and Paul told the chairman he wasn’t happy about the way he was responding to his complaint. The confrontation was a big enough problem that in the ensuing hours the RNC dispatched staff to smooth over the situation with Paul’s team, assuring them that Priebus didn’t mean to offend by not taking his concerns seriously.
Paul was steamed enough to confront Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. He thought Paul was joking. Paul informed him that, as a matter of fact, he wasn’t joking at all — and Paul told the chairman he wasn’t happy about the way he was responding to his complaint. The confrontation was a big enough problem that in the ensuing hours the RNC dispatched staff to smooth over the situation with Paul’s team, assuring them that Priebus didn’t mean to offend by not taking his concerns seriously.
Paul may have dropped out of the 2016 president race on Wednesday but the signs of his demise and decline have been months in the making. The Kentucky senator, who pitched his libertarian-infused brand of conservatism as transformational for the Republican Party, instead finished fifth in the Iowa caucuses, with under 5 percent of the vote.
It was less than one quarter of the support his father, former Rep. Ron Paul, had drawn four years earlier.
“The conclusion ultimately was that we didn’t have enough momentum,” Paul told his finance team on a conference call Wednesday.
Paul’s entire campaign had been premised on the notion that as a younger, more polished and more talented politician, Rand Paul could expand the libertarian grass-roots movement that had powered Ron Paul’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns with tens of millions of dollars and thousands of impassioned volunteers.
But the younger Paul’s triangulating ended up leaving him isolated. The establishment cavalry never came and the libertarian troops left him.
“I think he was doing as much following as he was leading,” said Frayda Levin, an influential libertarian GOP donor who sits on the board of directors of the Club for Growth. “He wanted to win more than he wanted to support the principles.”
Levin supported Paul early but soured on him as a presidential candidate (she still supports his reelection to the Senate). “Maybe I didn’t know who he was, maybe he’s not who I wanted him to be,” she said. “The only thing I know is he was not the principled libertarian spokesperson that I wanted to support.”
Paul never even got a good 24 hours in the race. He had hoped to be the first to announce his candidacy, leaking the date of his early April launch to excite supporters and the media. But Ted Cruz jumped the line, rushing to announce his own campaign at Liberty University in late March. When Paul did announce, two weeks later, he immediately trampled all over his own news cycle, going on the “Today” show and shushing Savannah Guthrie for questioning his shifting positions on Israel and Iran.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Paul pushed back testily.
It was just the first unwanted and untimely distraction, indicative of a candidate and a campaign staff that lacked discipline. There was the time one of Paul’s New Hampshire operatives licked the camera of a Democratic tracker to dissuade him from filming a Paul event. The lens-licking clip went viral. And the time that Paul decided to livestream a full day on the trail in Iowa last fall. Paul answered popular Google searches aloud.
“Is Rand Paul still running for president? I dunno,” he said. “I wouldn’t be doing this dumbass livestreaming if I weren’t. So yes, I still am running for president. Get over it.”
Initially, there had been hope among Paul’s team that he would attract top-notch fundraisers, such as Jack Oliver and Dorinda Moss. It didn’t happen. Oliver went to work for Jeb Bush, Moss to Marco Rubio. And the Paul staff was never able to put together a large enough group of bundlers. By midsummer, they had less than 50 bundlers on hand.
Paul entered 2016 essentially broke, with $1.27 million in the bank and nearly $250,000 in unpaid bills. Some of the money he had left was earmarked for a general election that would never come. He had burned through more money than he raised in each of his last two full quarters as a candidate.
His allied super PACs stumbled, too. As Bush, Cruz and Rubio posted tens of millions in receipts, Paul’s allies struggled to reach eight figures. The biggest donor to his father’s super PAC, Peter Thiel, cut a $2 million check to Carly Fiorina.
“Rand’s not somebody who’s offering access for sale, goodies or anything except, ‘I’m guy the to get government off your back,’” said Jesse Benton, a top Paul super PAC strategist and his 2010 Senate campaign manager. “While I think that’s the best thing a leader can do for us, it’s not necessarily the best way to get people to open their wallets.”
Further complicating matters: Two of the top strategists at Paul’s main super PAC, Benton and John Tate, were indicted on federal charges stemming from the 2012 Ron Paul campaign. The charges against Tate were thrown out and Benton was acquitted in October, though both were re-indicted by a federal grand jury in November. “Didn’t affect us,” Benton said.
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Paul came to the Senate in 2010 on the strength of his anti-Washington tea party message, but in 2016 that outsider call to arms was broadcast louder by Donald Trump and more effectively by Ted Cruz. Paul himself had muddled it, after spending much of 2013 and 2014 maneuvering to get into the good graces of GOP elites. He starred in television commercials for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the midterms and endorsed his Senate colleague Mitch McConnell over a tea party challenger.
Paul’s brain trust cites two factors that undercut Paul more than any others: “ISIS and Trump fundamentally transformed the dynamic of the race,” Chip Englander, Paul’s campaign manager, told POLITICO.
Paul’s slogan had been to “defeat the Washington machine” but it found precious little airtime in a Trump-dominated race. Cruz made destroying the “Washington cartel” a slogan. And political outsiders like Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina ran against D.C. without the burden of having to serve in the Senate.
“There was a lot of competition in the ‘drain the swamp’ space,” Benton said.
Then there was Trump. “It was 24/7 Donald Trump for months,” Doug Stafford, Paul’s chief political strategist, said in a conference call for reporters Wednesday.
To get attention, Paul increasingly resorted to gimmicks, like taking a chainsaw to the tax code and lighting it on fire.
As one of the GOP’s leading non-interventionist voices, Paul had been hailed as the leader of a coming libertarian moment. But with increasing instability in the Middle East, a major terrorist attack in Paris and an attack in San Bernardino, California, Paul’s risk-averse brand of foreign policy fell out of favor, as the Republican Party returned to its roots as proponents of a more muscular and aggressive international posture.
“Political environments are not made by campaigns,” Stafford said. “They’re made by external events.”
For those libertarians remaining, Paul faced stiff competition from Cruz, who courted them privately and publicly all of 2015, at one point releasing a cutting video of past Ron Paul supporters saying why they had flipped for Cruz. “We’re going after that base,” said a senior Ted Cruz adviser last fall. “But when they’re taking people’s head off in the Middle East, that’s less of a base.”
As his poll numbers cratered in the fall, Paul faced increasing pressure from McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee to refocus on his Senate reelection in 2016. His presidential campaign was going nowhere and they didn’t want to worry about a seat in rock-ribbed Kentucky. Even as it collapsed, Paul’s campaign kept public backbiting to a minimum.
“It was pretty clear the ship was going down in September, but you didn’t see anybody jumping ship,” said a person in the Paul orbit. “I think that indicates the character of the people involved, and the character of Rand, that he inspired that much loyalty that they stuck through it — and didn’t slit each others’ throats.”
By mid-January, Paul’s poor polling numbers cost him a spot on the main debate stage and he protested by not showing up at the undercard contest. Paul lost his place on the main stage under Fox’s polling criteria because one survey’s results were announced too late, even though the poll had been conducted before Fox’s self-imposed deadline. Paul’s campaign aggressively lobbied Fox and the RNC, to no avail.
“Fox basically shrugged their shoulders and said tough shit,” a senior Paul adviser said.
Paul would make the final debate before Iowa — and deliver his strongest performance to date, without a protesting Trump on stage — but it mattered little by then.
In the spin room afterward, Paul, clutching his wife Kelley’s hand, was virtually ignored as Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe held court nearby for a dozen reporters. When Paul’s communications director, Sergio Gor, spotted a Washington Post reporter in the Cruz crush, one of the few who had continued to cover the Paul campaign even in its decline, he angled the senator toward the scrum. Cruz’s aides looked on with a mix of bemusement and awe as their onetime rival was reduced to crashing into the post-game presser of their staff.
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The end would come soon. The day before the Iowa caucuses, Paul brought his father to campaign with him in Iowa for the first time. Ron Paul had finished third in Iowa, with 21.5 percent, in 2012, but Rand’s campaign had been slow to bring him out on the trail, fearful it would detract from the effort to establish Rand as a more mainstream figure.
The younger Paul’s campaign had long talked about mobilizing 10,000 Iowa college students, touting the fact that universities hadn’t been in session in 2008 and 2012. They tallied only 8,461 votes, not just of students, but total voters, good for only 4.5 percent.
The internal goal had been a top five finish. “If we got a top five we would go on,” Steve Munisteri, a senior adviser, told POLITICO. But when Paul called him the morning after Iowa, Munisteri had other thoughts. “My advice was that he not go on.”
Paul was also on the precipice of another debate embarrassment, unlikely to qualify for Saturday’s debate, according to ABC News’ criteria. Paul would inform his senior staff that he was out by Tuesday night. They spun his early departure as leaving on “the highest note we were going to have,” finishing ahead of Bush, who spent millions in Iowa, as well as his frequent sparring partner, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
“We did not see a surge in fundraising on that fifth-place finish,” explained one of Paul's senior strategists. “Some money came in. You keep paying bills and live a little bit off the land but to what point? We took fifth. What then? We take ninth? After New Hampshire, South Carolina — that was always going to be a disaster state no matter what position the campaign was in. So the calendar was getting worse for us in the short term.”
By Wednesday, Paul was back in the Senate corridors.
He had always hedged his bets, pushing through a first-ever caucus in Kentucky that allowed him to run for president and reelection simultaneously. He maintained a 95-percent voting record in the heat of the presidential campaign — far higher than fellow senators Marco Rubio or Cruz. Stafford called it a “remarkable accomplishment.”
It is one he’ll likely tout back in Kentucky, where he is up for reelection in 2016.
“I will be spending a lot of energy and time on the reelect,” Paul told his financial backers Wednesday. “We think we have a good chance. But we won’t take anything for granted. And we’ll work very hard. Hopefully we’ll be able to remain a national voice for all of these principles in the time coming.”
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