Remember Republican presidential front-runner Rand Paul?

Journey back to the spring of 2014, some 18 months ago, and it was a thing. The Kentucky senator was racking up double-digit support in every national GOP primary poll. He sat at the top in New Hampshire, second in Iowa, and was on pace to be a major player in the nomination scrum.

Perhaps more importantly, he was regularly offering up the most unique ideas in the arena and attempting to expand the Republican tent with gutsy gambits in front of unfamiliar audiences.

Then in 2015, the great field of 2016 expanded, Donald Trump exploded onto the scene and Paul got overwhelmed – and downright ornery.

In a sardine-can field of 15, just over three months from the Iowa caucuses, Paul is now among the handful of GOP White House hopefuls simply fighting for relevancy.



What's different about Paul – despite his campaign's slide – is that he's truly a different type of politician.

At heart and gut, he's a libertarian whose father's previous White House campaigns left him some formation of an organizational base, even if it has fractured a bit. He's willing to take risks – whether that means a toe-to-toe smackdown with Trump and Chris Christie in the first debate or an awkwardly conceived live stream experiment. And though he's shown some signs of wavering in the heat of this campaign, he's been willing to break with GOP ideology on foreign policy, domestic surveillance and drug criminalization.

He doesn't appear to relish the requisite hugging and backslapping of donors in private or voters in public – and doesn't even try to fake it. Paul is at his best when constructing an argument about how his party can maintain its core principles but change enough to reap electoral success.

Now, he's forced to see if he can do that himself.

Paul has fallen to sixth in Iowa and eighth in New Hampshire, so his campaign's resurrection is dependent on a couple of factors outside the numbers. One is the theory of fluidity: the fact that most Republican voters remain persuadable, even if the majority is gravitating to Trump and Carson. It's an oft-cited life raft, although Paul has less control over the cycle's mood than almost anything, as many a candidate has found.

The second is organization – the foundation that will only matter if Paul whips up renewed interest in himself somehow. On this point, the Paul campaign tells U.S. News it is in the process of deploying six or seven staffers from its national headquarters to Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire.



It is particularly focused on students in Iowa, who will be on campus and able to participate in the caucuses on Feb. 1, unlike in previous cycles when the gatherings were held over winter break. Paul has a student coordinator on every campus in the state that's home to at least 1,000 students, and motivating thousands of these young people to caucus will be crucial to his comeback formula.

Paul has 15 staffers in Iowa, compared with Jeb Bush's 10. In New Hampshire, he has 10 compared with Bush's 12. The point: There's parity, even against a much better funded campaign.

As for paying for these endeavors, campaign manager Chip Englander says Paul just completed a retreat with his top donors in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and 30 bundlers doubled-down on commitments going forward. A four-day "money bomb" that followed reeled in $200,000.

"We treat our campaign dollars as preciously as Rand treats taxpayers' money," Englander says. "Jeb's budget-slashing would save more than $1 million per month. We spend less than a million dollars a month already."





Paul is unquestionably down; what he's desperate to convey is that he's not dead.

Here's a lightly edited transcript of an interview with Paul about the challenges he faces in facilitating a rebound:

Q: What's the evidence that your campaign is on an upswing?

Paul: "Because there are numbers in the polls, people equate that with math and with sound science. I think almost every one of the polls that people are still taking, 85 percent of the people in the poll are undecided. So essentially these are small national polls of leaners. In a way, we've overreported the horse race among these leaner polls but not really looked at how well people are organized. We've organized a lot of the caucus states. I think we have a college group in every state of the union, 350 college groups around the country and 20 of them in Iowa. We are in it to win it basically. We'd love to get that story out."

Q: You're moving more staff into the early states. That's a reflection of what? Is that a response to something?

Paul: "There's a lot of organizational work in the beginning that can be done at headquarters. But now the people from headquarters are moving into the states and going to spend more time in the states. We keep hearing narratives, 'Oh, we're losing the liberty people.' Just not true. There were nine out of 10 people that were on the [Iowa state GOP] central committee under the Ron Paul person that ran the Republican Party. Nine out of 10 of them are with us. The vast majority of the leadership that were my dad's people in Iowa are all with us."

Q: If these are just leaners in polls, if you go back a year and a half, two years, you were doing a lot better with those leaners, even if you say they haven't fully made their decision. You were at 20 percent or more in some of these polls. So there has been a change.

Paul: "Yep, and I think there's no way you can dispute that things do change. When there was a less crowded field and we were making news and doing things that people liked, people leaned in our direction. People are very, very unhappy. They see a Republican House, a Republican Senate and they want to know what we're doing. They want to know why there hasn't been any kind of power of the purse exerted, why the deficit continues to soar, why the spending continues to soar. And I'm with the populace on this one. I think we should use more leverage. I won't vote to raise the debt ceiling, but I have introduced Cut, Cap and Balance, which would cut the deficit in half in one year, cap the spending and pass a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution in order to raise the debt ceiling. That's hardball tactics, but I think that's what we need."

Q: You think it hurts you being a senator in this race?

Paul: "I think that people are really, really unhappy and their anger is directed at Washington. And I think where people flock is to the brightest light with the loudest megaphone, biggest megaphone. For the last month or two, I think that's been Trump. But I think we've seen a cresting of that. Ultimately, I don't think people are that attracted to vulgarity. I don't think vulgarity equates with insight. There is a time now that there's going to be a reassessment. There will be some reconsideration as things go on and people get to know the candidates better."

Q: But there is Ben Carson still standing there, and he's up in the new Iowa poll[s]. He's not vulgar – if anything, he has a more quiet temperament. What's the contrast that you would present with him?

Paul: "The reason for him rising is outsider also. They're both outsiders but they're polar opposites of each other as far as temperament. I think ultimately people will ask questions there. While Dr. Carson's a nice man and informed on medicine, will he be somebody who the voters judge to be informed enough about what's going on with government to be in charge of it? The main thing is the fluidity of this. We think there's a long way to go."

Q: You said back in April, "I do think we need to win New Hampshire." Does that still stand?

Paul: "I do think we need to win an early primary state. Could be New Hampshire, could be Iowa, could be Nevada, could be South Carolina. We do need to win one of the early ones. I don't think in the history there's been anybody who wins who doesn't win one of the early ones. But I'm not making an absolute point if we got second in the first two, that we'd say, 'Oh well, we didn't get first, we're done.' In a 10-person race, this is going to be the first time we've had this many people."

Q: Scott Walker made the point that he thought the party needed to unite to take on Trump. Do you believe that needs to happen? What if the field doesn't shrink before February and you still have 15 candidates on the ballot?

Paul: "Most Republicans believe in [the] free market, believe in competition – I'm one of those. One voter doesn't get to decide, neither does the media. The pollsters don't get to decide, one ex-presidential candidate doesn't get to decide. Polls have been so off, even when we get close to elections. Look at Ed Gillespie. Everybody thought he was down 10 and he was dead even. Same with Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia. Everybody thought he was down 10, he was dead even. Pat Roberts in Kansas. Everybody said, 'Dead even,' and he won ... [Mitch] McConnell, everybody thought he was up 5 and he was up 15. A lot of these races, the polls were so far off. Imagine a 10-person race or a 15-person race where you're polling 300 people."

Q: But do you think the campaign is likely to go longer and the early states won't be as important because you'll have people bunched up? You won't have as big a difference between first and fourth place in these early states, and it's a delegate fight that goes on through March, April, May?