Damon Thayer, a Republican state senator, rose on the Kentucky Senate floor Tuesday to respond to the critical speech a Democrat had just given about his bill. “If we game this out and we are preparing for the inauguration of President Paul on Jan. 20, 2017…” Thayer began.

President Paul. As in Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

The national polls and punditry that are crowning Paul the frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination have made their way to Kentucky, and some folks are pretty excited.

“Right now you can make a legitimate list of 10 or 12 [people] who have a chance to be the next president of the United States,” Thayer said. “Senator Paul is currently, according to polls and pundits, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to be president of the United States.”

Thayer’s bill, a clarifying measure that seeks to solve a ballot-access issue facing Paul if he tries to run for the White House and his Senate seat at the same time, passed the state Senate this week, the most recent win in a string of momentum-building events that has, along with the commonwealth’s closely watched Senate race, brought national political reporters to Kentucky for a closer look at Paul the frontrunner.

“We’re not just caught in a moment,” said Nate Morris, a close friend and informal advisor of Paul’s who lives in Lexington, Ky. “He’s clearly making a deeper connection with the American people, and it’s an exciting thing to watch it keep growing.”

And to the faithful here in the Bluegrass, there’s no question that it will.

***

If the conventional wisdom right now is that Paul could win the nomination, then the national trend-setters are far behind Paul’s supporters in Kentucky.

Paul has enjoyed fundraisers with prominent establishment Republican donors, played golf with Donald Trump, taken gold in two prominent conservative straw polls and networked endlessly with Republicans across the country. But between trips to Silicon Valley and Manhattan and when he’s not doing his day job in Washington (you’d be forgiven for thinking lately that his day job is appearing on cable news and Sunday shows), Paul is here in the Bluegrass State, testifying on behalf of state legislation that would restore felons’ voter rights in Frankfort, continuing his outreach efforts to the black community in Louisville and attending Lincoln Day dinners all over the state.

As a man thinking about a run for the Republican nomination, Paul would be hard-pressed to find a better training ground. With its distinct regions and brands of Republicanism, Kentucky is a perfect campaign laboratory. The deep social conservative streak of Iowa and South Carolina is mirrored in the Purchase region of Western Kentucky and the Appalachian Mountains in the east, while the north is home to a vibrant and vocal Tea Party constituency that looks a lot like the libertarian streak of New Hampshire’s GOP. And the party’s establishment is well represented among the old-money elite of Lexington and Louisville.

About two weeks after I moved here from Washington, in mid-October of last year, I spent a day with Paul as he toured eastern Kentucky, attending a rotary lunch, working crowded restaurants, discussing the just-ended government shutdown and his plan for “Economic Freedom Zones”—ZIP codes with high unemployment rates that would get large taxes cuts.

At every stop, I was hit with déjà vu from countless hours spent awkwardly following presidential candidates through diners and ice cream parlors. Parents prodded their kids ahead of the crowd to shake Paul’s hand and senior citizens in University of Kentucky Wildcats sweatshirts posed for pictures with him.

George Steele, the mayor of Grayson, waited in the short line of people who wanted to meet Paul as he was leaving the Estep Family Restaurant.

“It would be an honor to call you Mr. President,” Steele told Paul.

The only things missing on that gray day in October were television cameras and a team of embedded campaign reporters tasked with following Paul’s every move. That is gradually changing, as more local television crews are showing up at his stops and national magazine writers are booking tickets to Louisville.

Paul long enjoyed a mostly positive run of press, evolving from curiosity to candidate to phenomenon. His shocking ascent in 2010, his 13-hour filibuster of CIA Director John Brennan, his watched but oft-maligned attempts at outreach to the black community have all combined to make Paul something of a novelty until recently.

Even scandals like former aide Jack Hunter’s past as a pro-Confederate shock jock seemed to slide off Paul. But the plagiarism scandal last fall—in which Paul was accused of lifting numerous passages in his speeches and books—was different. It dominated cable news and seemed to last forever. Almost three years before a single vote would be cast in the 2016 election, folks were asking if Paul would recover.

Fortunately for Paul, Chris Christie’s troubles soon overshadowed the plagiarism mess. But the harshness of the spotlight seemed to give Paul, or more accurately, his wife Kelley, pause about a presidential run. People close to the Pauls said this week that while the couple have an ongoing conversation about whether he should run, Kelley Paul’s concerns have not yet been assuaged.

Paul’s critics certainly aren’t going anywhere, and just like the rest of the country, Kentucky has them in abundance. Democrats here dislike him just as much as Democrats anywhere else. To many, Paul’s controversial statement in 2010 that parts of the Civil Rights Act encroached upon free enterprise, his association with the isolationist foreign policies views of his father and any number of other mini-controversies should disqualify him.

Some just think he’s crazy, and there’s no convincing them otherwise.

***

Still, there’s evidence that Paul’s efforts to broaden his coalition beyond the Tea Party that elected him are working. In Kentucky, the best example might be the Bluegrass version of Paul’s outreach to the black community.

Nationally, Paul’s outreach speech to the Detroit Economic Club was mocked because of an overwhelming lack of black faces in the crowd. But Paul was rewarded for his efforts with an invitation to speak to the NAACP later this year.

Locally, a similar dynamic has played out, with Paul being occasionally lampooned for his efforts even as they appear to yield some results.

Gerald Neal of Louisville is one of Kentucky’s two black state senators (both of them voted against Thayer’s bill), and a vocal critic of Paul, telling me last December that the senator’s outreach efforts were nothing but “pandering” in an attempt to “soften his image.”

“There’s nothing exciting about this to me,” Neal said. “He’s never going to get the vast majority or significant amount of African-American votes because of his statements and policies. That’s not going to happen.”

But Rev. Kevin Cosby, an influential black leader in Louisville’s West End, calls the senator a friend, and he’s eager to praise Paul for his efforts on restoring felons’ voting rights, ending mandatory sentencing laws for drug crimes and promoting Economic Freedom Zones, which would include the West End.

“I think he is a man of conviction,” Cosby told me. “And whether you agree with him or disagree with him, he has his core beliefs. And some of those core beliefs are important to the black community.”

Cosby has a congregation of 14,000 people—including Neal—at St. Stephen’s church, and he is also the president of the historically black Simmons College in Louisville. When Simmons finally received national accreditation in late February, Paul was there.

It was at the school that I met Cosby and Paul late last year and was allowed to sit in as the two men discussed Malcolm X. In an office lined with African ceremonial masks, Paul listened intently to Cosby, who later told me that Paul is asking the right questions and seems genuinely interested in the answers, pointing out that Paul, a Texas native, has learned that while a term like “states’ rights” is a rallying cry for many conservatives, to black voters it can sound like a call for a return to the era of the Dixiecrats.

If Paul is faking it, he’s committed to the scam.

***

If there’s a danger zone for Paul so far this year, it’s in the form of Louisville businessman Matt Bevin, the Republican candidate challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Paul’s decision to back McConnell has opened doors and stifled critics within establishment Republican circles, but it has also caused consternation among the faithful. Whispers that Paul had gone establishment have grown to shouts at times, but the fallout appears to be minimal and Bevin has struggled to gain traction.

The senator is ever mindful that he needs to reach out to the party establishment while also keeping his base intact, perhaps an impossible task given the severity of the rift between the two wings of the party, but one that makes Paul seem increasingly like the candidate who could bring an end to the Republican Civil War.

The harsher the criticisms lobbed at Bevin by McConnell, the more uncomfortable Paul appears. He was, after all, the man who ran an insurgent campaign against McConnell’s hand-picked successor to Sen. Jim Bunning and won.

But if Bevin’s numbers stay in the basement and McConnell hangs on to become majority leader of a new Republican Senate, delivering a win in the battle between the establishment and right wing of the party, Paul will have been vital to that effort—something a lot of establishment Republican donors might be willing to reward, especially at the suggestion of a Majority Leader McConnell.

***

Paul’s biggest concern right now may be that he’s peaking too early.

After Peter Beinart declared Paul the frontrunner in the Atlantic in January, I asked the senator about his newfound status.

“That sounds unlucky to me,” he said, laughing.

And it does appear that his streak of good luck is about to come to an end. The bill Thayer shepherded out of the state Senate this week is almost certain to die in the Democrat-controlled House.

Speaker of the House Greg Stumbo has repeatedly scoffed at the legislation, saying, “We kind of take the position over here that a man [who] can’t decide which office he wants to run for isn’t fit to hold either office.”

But the defeat is not unexpected, and in the eyes of Randland, the effort helps clarify their legal options. There are a number of avenues still available to Paul—his campaign does not believe the current law is constitutional or that it would prevent him from running for both seats. The attempt to pass clarifying legislation was a good way for him to see who in the state is with him and who’s against him.

It seems hard to fathom this far out that Paul’s decision to run or not could be made for him by a Kentucky state law, especially if Republicans can retake the statehouse this November for the first time since 1921 or if one of Paul's allies were to become governor in 2015.

An ally like, for example, Agriculture Commissioner James Comer. He's a rising star in the state Republican Party, and a potential gubernatorial candidate with a good chance of winning and a deep loyalty to Paul — Comer was about the only state representative to endorse Paul in his 2010 primary against McConnell-backed Trey Grayson.

Comer this week lamented how Kentucky, with its late primary and solid Red State reputation, rarely plays much of a role in the process of selecting a president.

“It used to be something a few of us in Kentucky talked about,” Comer said. “But now the idea of a President Paul is sweeping the country. The man has become a movement. And it’s a special thing to watch.”