Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently reinforced his emerging status as a legit 2016 contender, electrifying the base at the Conservative Political Action Conference and for the second time winning the CPAC straw poll. And like another freshman senator who came from nowhere to secure his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, Paul is poised to make a strong run at the presidency.
It’s early yet — and anything could happen in the roughly two years before GOP primary voters start casting presidential ballots. But already, Paul’s path to a potential presidential nomination is becoming clear. Here, a brief look at how he could do it.
Get the momentum — and run with it: The libertarian Paul doesn’t seem like a particularly Iowa-friendly candidate, so his first truly critical test would be to win the New Hampshire primary, where candidates with independent streaks often thrive, and which gets massive media coverage and can launch or destroy a candidate’s presidential dreams. Paul is already off to a good start: He topped the WPA Opinion Research poll of attendees at the Northeast Republican Conference in Nashua. Meanwhile, CNN says Paul has already “done something his father never did — top the list of potential Republican presidential candidates in a national poll.” A CNN/ORC poll finds that “16 percent of Republicans and independents who lean toward the GOP say they would be likely to support the senator from Kentucky for the 2016 nomination.”
Woo disaffected and millennial voters:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.