Ron Paul’s performance is a testament to his appeal to young voters. Ron Paul continues to best Giuliani

Ron Paul, the Texas congressman frequently dismissed as a long shot candidate with no real chance at winning the Republican presidential nomination, has won nearly twice as many total votes to date as Rudy Giuliani, a candidate still widely viewed as a strong contender.

With his second place finish in Saturday’s Nevada caucus, where Paul defeated Giuliani in every county in the state, the Texas congressman has now received 106,414 votes to 60,220 for Giuliani. Both candidates have collected zero actual delegates.


Paul’s performance is a testament to his appeal to young voters, who have disproportionately supported his candidacy. According to exit and entrance polls, Paul came in second among 18 to 24-year-olds in New Hampshire and finished a close third in Iowa after Mitt Romney among the 17 to 29-year-old demographic.

“There are a lot of things in Ron Paul’s message that resonate with younger voters,” said Ethan Eilon, executive director of the College Republican National Committee. “The anti-establishment ring to what he’s got to say, typically younger voters tend to gravitate to that to some degree.”

Paul’s head-to-head success against Giuliani reflects, to a degree, the former New York City mayor’s high-risk strategy of partially bypassing the early states and betting everything on a victory in Florida’s Jan. 29 primary.

The Giuliani campaign contends that Paul’s lead over Giuliani will not last through the coming avalanche of big states where Giuliani has campaigned more than most of his opponents.

“We’re less than seven days from Florida, where we expect the mayor to be successful,” said Giuliani spokeswoman Maria Comella. “We’ve always planned a national strategy that we haven’t wavered from.”

But Giuliani’s exceptionally weak performance so far, relative to Paul, whose own campaign has lagged in the polls, is nevertheless a troubling sign.

Right up until the Iowa caucuses Giuliani ran ahead of the field in national polls. He raised more money than any other candidate except Romney. Though he did not actively campaign in Iowa, Giuliani still aired television and radio ads there—and Paul easily bested Giuliani for fifth place with 10 percent to Giuliani’s 4 percent.

In New Hampshire, where Giuliani trailed only Romney in the number of campaign visits to the state through the end of 2007, Giuliani won only 9 percent, putting him in fourth place barely ahead of Paul.

But New Hampshire, it turned out, proved to be the high point of Giuliani’s campaign thus far. In the next two primaries, Paul doubled Giuliani’s numbers. In Michigan, Paul finished fourth with 6 percent while Giuliani staggered into sixth place at 3 percent. In South Carolina, Paul again placed above Giuliani, with 4 percent of the vote to Giuliani’s 2 percent.

Regardless of Florida plays out, the Paul campaign is ready to declare victory over Giuliani in the battle of ideas.

“It’s a testament to the direction the Republican Party is heading in the future,” said Paul’s national youth outreach director, Jeff Frazee. He attributes the difference in Giuliani and Paul’s youth support to their differences over issues like civil liberties, saying, “Young people are interested in freedom. They are not interested in more authoritarians.”