Jonathan Bydlak served as director of fundraising for Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign. He is the founder and president of the Coalition to Reduce Spending.

Since serving as Ron Paul’s fundraising director in 2008, I have often been asked what made Congressman Paul so popular—why he was able to raise so much money, especially online. In recent months, a new question has replaced the old ones: Will his son be able to do the same?

Earlier this year, when reporters began calling to ask for my predictions about how Paul the younger’s fundraising momentum would compare to his father’s, I behaved as I thought was appropriate: I hedged. I bit my tongue. I answered cautiously.


Through it all, I haven’t said what now seems increasingly obvious: There is little chance that Rand Paul’s momentum will ever match that of Ron Paul. The unfortunate reason is clear: Rand Paul doesn’t stand for much of anything anymore.

Dismal headlines this week in politico (“ Inside Rand Paul’s downward spiral”), The Washington Post (“ ‘The most interesting man in politics’ isn’t drawing much interest in New Hampshire”) and The Daily Beast (“ The Cancer on Rand Paul’s Campaign”) all but write an obituary for what was supposed to be a generation-shifting campaign.

Regardless of whether one is inclined to believe the media, it’s no longer possible to ignore the fact that Paul’s support is slipping. His New Hampshire numbers have dropped from 14 percent in February to just four percent according to a poll released Sunday (By comparison, Ron Paul received nearly 8 percent of the state’s vote in 2008 and over 22 percent in 2012). Senator Paul’s national ratings, though they matter little at this point, have also dropped. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday put Paul at six percent, in a four-way tie for fourth place.

Senator Paul has raised significantly less than most major candidates, pulling in $6.9 million, including a $1.6 million transfer from his Senate committee. Affiliated super PACs have raised only $5 million. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush’s super PAC has raised $103 million, and Ted Cruz’s got over $37 million.

By comparison, in the last two quarters of 2007, Ron Paul, who had literally zero percent name ID in early internal analyses, raised $25.2 million, second only to Rudy Giuliani’s $26 million. (Governor Mitt Romney’s receipts were heavily dependent on loans made to his own campaign.) Super PACs, of course, were not a factor.

In 2007, Ron Paul’s success was called “astounding.” In 2015, Rand Paul finds himself having to explain “paltry” returns.

How did we get here?

Perhaps I should start by answering how I got here.

In 2007, I was preparing to transition beyond my first post-college job, and like many 23-year-olds, wasn’t sure exactly to what, weighing law school or maybe business school. Politics wasn’t on my radar when a friend sent me an article by Radley Balko—“ Ron Paul, the Real Republican?”

“When you read about a vote in Congress that goes something like 412-1, odds are pretty good that the sole ‘nay’ came from Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas,” Balko wrote. “Paul isn't a reflexive contrarian—he doesn't oppose just to oppose,” he continued. “Rather, he has a core set of principles that guide him. They happen to be the same principles envisioned by the framers of the U.S. Constitution: limited government, federalism, free trade and commerce—with a premium on peace.”

I was hooked. The more I read about the Congressman from Texas, the more excited I became. Like thousands of people across the country, I joined my local “Meetup” group. These online grassroots organizing communities sprung up by the thousands all around the country. Together, ours blanketed Fairfield County, Connecticut with homemade signs and Ron Paul literature. I’ll never forget sitting in a small chain restaurant one night and passing around a basket to gather some extra cash for canvassing supplies. Within 20 minutes, we’d raised over $1,000.

I was no longer uncertain about my career path.

I sent my resume to the campaign, hoping for a regional post, but found myself interviewing in Washington, D.C. and being tapped by campaign chairman Kent Snyder as Director of Fundraising.

In retrospect, I’m not sure if our scrappy office of 20-somethings crowded above an Arlington dry cleaner realized how significantly we were changing the world. But every person in the office deeply believed in what we were doing.

This energy translated into innovative and wildly successful fundraising. We ultimately raised over $35 million , largely online and via social media, well before Obama for America mastered the craft. There was one major reason for that success: Congressman Paul exuded a sincerity that even those who disagreed with him had to respect and that his base found electrifying.

Paul had one of the most consistent voting records in Congress and hadn’t changed his message over time (as viral clips proved). His message—limited government with even more limited foreign intervention, respect for the individual, sound money and fiscal responsibility—brought together a diverse and dedicated following. And while Paul is staunchly pro-life, he avoided the type of alienating social issues rhetoric that many Republicans struggle with.

Ultimately, of course, Congressman Paul would not be President. His steadfast and sometimes quirky libertarianism failed to make inroads within the GOP, but it ignited a nationwide movement that hungered for someone to take it to the next level.

Enter Dr. Rand Paul.

Rand Paul was always supposed to be different from Ron Paul. Any serious political observer realized he could not win a Republican nomination—or any nomination—holding the hardcore positions of his father. But his pragmatism has evolved over the years into boilerplate Republican talking points. Today he is a candidate who has very few unique positions on anything.

His recent polling and fundraising numbers show the results of this trajectory.

It wasn’t always this way.

Rand Paul won national acclaim two years ago with his well-publicized 13-hour filibuster of the President’s drone policy. Paul declared on the Senate floor, “I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important. That our right to trial by jury is precious.”

After that impressive performance, I was thrilled to stand with Rand, as were millions of other Americans. Public opinion on drones changed almost overnight: As Business Insider noted, “Support for targeting American citizens suspected of being terrorists abroad dropped 13 points among Republicans, 17 points among Democrats and a whopping 23 points among Independents.”

Paul comfortably polled at or near the top of the field for the rest of the year and through 2014.

Fast forward to April 2015. Following a controversial drone strike that killed two alleged American al Qaeda operatives and two hostages, one of whom was also American, Rand Paul struck a very different tone.

“I've been an opponent of using drones [on] people not involved in combat,” he began. But “if you are holding hostages, you kind of are involved in combat,” he said. And “you don't get due process or anything like that in a war zone.” He added that the captors “probably got what was coming to them,” though he regretted “some innocent people lost their lives, the hostages.”

Paul’s rationale perhaps wouldn’t have been noteworthy coming from another Republican. But in a time when there was significant criticism of the loss of hostages, it was baffling to libertarians that Senator Paul would come to a lame duck Democratic President’s defense.

Unlike many libertarians, I do not expect pure libertarian orthodoxy from Rand Paul. If a national figure is demonstrably closer to my ideals than the competition, that’s good enough. But the problem remains that Senator Paul is demonstrably all over the map.

After months of skepticism of U.S. involvement in Syria and Iraq, Rand Paul called for airstrikes—authorized by Congress. He later sought to “declare war” on ISIL and put boots on the ground. He’s done a complete 180 on the threat from Iran, signing the Tom Cotton letter opposing the recent nuclear deal. And while being one of the more nuanced voices opposing the deal, he’s still relied on the sort of fear mongering and misleading rhetoric his father rejected.

Ron Paul proudly thumbed his nose at Republican orthodoxy, fearlessly voicing his beliefs no matter how hated his position might make him among the GOP. His son, of course, cannot win a primary by following that exact model. But he has failed to make the Republican base trust him, while risking losing his own.

He said gay marriage “offends” him, and called for tent revivals to combat America’s “moral crisis” while simultaneously supporting ending marriage licenses altogether. He supports lowering sentences for drug offenses, and is publicly courting the marijuana industry, while very consistently making clear he opposes legalization. And in recent weeks, he’s gone so far as to apparently jump onto the Trump bandwagon in seeking to defund “sanctuary cities.”

He spent months reaching out to minority communities and branding himself as a “different kind of Republican” on police brutality and criminal justice reform—but when Baltimore was burning following Freddie Gray’s suspicious death in police custody, Paul couldn’t have been more tone deaf, scoffing how glad he was his “train didn’t stop” in Baltimore, and offering what seemed to be 1990s-era Moral Majority musings on the downfall of the family.

Unlike Ron Paul, who voted to cut government spending at every opportunity, Rand Paul voted last year for a flawed Veterans bill that included $10 billion in un-offset new spending, and then quietly offered an amendment this March to hike the Pentagon budget by billions more, a “ stunning reversal” from his 2011 calls for a 23 percent reduction. After widespread outcry, advisors insisted that critics had just gotten it wrong—that Senator Paul had offered the amendment, which included various politically impossible and non-defense cuts, to draw a line in the sand on whether Senators Rubio and Cruz were willing to pay for big Pentagon spending. This point was lost on nearly all media and, to my knowledge, has yet to be highlighted by Senator Paul himself.

Rand Paul and his defenders, of which I have frankly grown weary of being part, can explain nearly every one of these aberrations from past positions or ideology, but that is not the point. As the old saying goes, “Politics is like dating. If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

Any political calculation, ultimately, must be judged on its results. At this point, Rand Paul isn’t driving the political debate as his father did, nor does he appear likely to succeed electorally. Paul was supposed to inherit the energy of his father’s campaign and translate it into electoral victory. He is failing on both counts.

Senator Paul has taken great—and ultimately, necessary—steps to distance himself from some of the more outside-the-mainstream positions of Representative Paul. But while he is clearly not his father, the question remains: Who is he?

If Paul hopes to rebound into frontrunner status in the debates, he’d do well to recall the moment that helped launch his father into the national spotlight.

In the May 2007 Presidential debate, Ron Paul faced a hostile crowd and Mayor Rudy Giuliani demanding he apologize and take back his statement that U.S. involvement overseas had contributed to blowback. Ron Paul did not timidly agree or adopt a marginally different position.

Congressman Paul stood his ground and started a movement. It’s time for Senator Paul to revisit that playbook.