Richard Perry/The New York Times

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has admitted that he won’t have enough delegates at the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August to win the nomination.

But right after that announcement he racked up another win: his supporters now make up the majority of the delegation from the caucus state of Iowa. That’s the state allegedly “won” by Mitt Romney in January, which was later revealed to have been “won” by Rick Santorum.

Paul’s campaign has risen from many deaths. In mid-May, he announced he’d no longer campaign in upcoming primary states. He encouraged his forces to concentrate on caucus states, where dedication to a long process of local, district and state party meetings can trump just getting a mass of voters out on primary day to dutifully record a vote for the frontrunner.

Everyone spun that May announcement as “Paul drops out.” Since then, following his strategy, Paul’s people won delegations in Minnesota, Louisiana (in a victory contested by a rump Romney faction), and now Iowa. He already had Maine.

What can Paul and his movement do with these victories? Paul’s ratcheting back of his campaign in May came directly on the heels of two Republican state conventions, in Oklahoma and Arizona, which fell into wild tumult because of fights — sometimes literally physical fights — between the Paul and Romney forces. The Paul people in Oklahoma held their own rump convention in a parking lot. The Arizona Paul fans made news for booing Josh Romney.

That booing is symbolic of the struggle between two significant competing visions of what the Republican Party will be, a struggle, by the way, that is no longer between a vast majority and a tiny fringe. Paul people consider themselves not weird outsiders, but the true conservatives who actually want to rein in government within affordable, constitutional limits. Ron Paul’s campaign spokesmen are quick to distance themselves from any hint of the Paul movement being an angry, raucous anti-establishment rabble — the words “respect” and “decorum” flow from their lips as much as “limited government” and “end the Fed now.”

But Paul’s supporters want to keep fighting, and ferociously. Some in the radical Paul grassroots darkly assumed that the winding-down announcements were deliberately designed by sellout campaign pros to damp down their wildest enthusiasms.

One California lawyer, Richard Gilbert, got disgusted by what he saw as the official campaign’s lack of will to fight what he thinks were rampant dirty tricks and cheating on the state level by Romney forces. He filed (without the approval or support of the campaign) a federal lawsuit against the Republican National Committee. The suit argues that the R.N.C. cannot legally bind any delegate to vote for Romney. Paul’s more ardent fans believe that in an open convention, Paul still could win outright.

While Ron Paul has no future in politics, the Ron Paul machine and his son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, will. That’s why the political pros in the Paul movement don’t appreciate acting-out like Richard Gilbert’s lawsuit. That’s also why Rand Paul risked the wrath of his father’s hardcore fans by endorsing Mitt Romney, just as soon as Ron Paul admitted he would not win.

Senator Paul knows he needs to reach beyond his father’s 10-15 percent base in the primaries to more mainstream, red-state, talk-radio Republicans. He can’t do that by marking himself as a traitor to the party. So he stands behind nominee Romney and plans to actively campaign for him.

But he also can’t mark himself a traitor to the Ron Paul cause. So Rand Paul followed up his endorsement by calling out Romney in the pages of National Review for Romney’s declaration that he would have the authority as president to start a war with Iran. That sort of foreign policy adventurism — especially when done without respect for Congress’s traditional constitutional power over declaring war — is anathema to the core Ron Paul crowd, and Rand Paul condemned it.

Ron Paul antiwar appeal won him friends on the left, but it was also why this politician with impeccable credentials on core Republican issues like taxes (he wants to eliminate the income tax), spending (he’s the only Republican candidate with a budget that balanced in three years with no new taxes), and regulation (he thinks they strangle the wealth-creating properties of free markets) had such a hard time gaining traction with the Tea Party base, who don’t see the connection Paul sees between a constitutionally limited, affordable government and a less expansionist foreign policy.

If the Tea Party really were transpartisan outsiders dedicated to fighting bailouts and shrinking spending, Ron Paul should have been their man. In 2012, they’ve revealed themselves more as loyal Republicans than as a rebel army. Paul’s campaign is trying to gently guide the Paul movement through that same transition.

It’s a hard maneuver, if they wish to stand for his libertarian principles. Still, Paul’s appeal within the party is growing, not shrinking. He raised more money this time around than last time, despite having little concrete to show his supporters from the last campaign. He got more than twice as many votes and percentages of votes. He will have hundreds of delegates on the floor in Tampa. He will likely have many more hundreds of supporters rallying in the streets in Tampa.

On the one hand, Ron Paul’s refusal to run as the candidate of a third party shows that he sees his cause’s fate linked with the future of the Republican Party. On the other, his refusal to endorse Romney shows that if they want to help shape that party in a more libertarian direction, he and his supporters can’t just go along to get along.

Indeed, despite the Rand Paul endorsement, Romney will be hard-pressed to win the votes of many Paul fans in November, though he’s clearly trying not to offend them intentionally by openly disrespecting their man. Paul’s fans are driven by a sense of crisis. For his whole political career, Paul has been predicting big trouble based on government overreach — with spending, with monetary policy, with managing Americans’ choices, and with a world-straddling, expensive, imperial foreign policy. Paul’s devotees see those crises as no longer looming, but here right now. America, they think, could soon be Greece. And they don’t see how a Romney who supported bailouts, who thinks a trillion-dollar spending cut would harm the economy, who helped lay the groundwork for ObamaCare, who believes in more overseas wars, can save America.

It’s easy for establishments to mock that sort of fervor. But the Republican Party has seen young, radically anti-government, quirky, curious movements conquer before. The Goldwater kids did it in the ’60s; the Religious Right did it in the wake of Pat Robertson’s failed presidential bid in 1988.

When Paul announced last July that he wouldn’t seek re-election for the House seat he’s held since 1997, he said, “I don’t think I have a political career so much as trying to change the course of history.” That’s what his supporters still want to do. Many of them have decided that they need to do that by taking over the Republican Party from the bottom up. Many of them also realize that they can’t change the course of history sufficiently by voting for Mitt Romney. Even when Ron Paul is gone, his supporters will be continuing the Ron Paul campaign.

Brian Doherty is a senior editor at Reason magazine and the author of “Ron Paul’s Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired,” which was published last month.