I was there. I worked on Senator Rand Paul’s presidential campaign, and I witnessed campaign staff and volunteers who were working hard to advance libertarian ideas. There was so much passion for the Paul campaign, and yet there were so many candidates in the race. It was difficult to break through the noise to get voters to focus on the unique message coming from Senator Paul.

This election cycle, the establishment will again emerge victorious, but not without feeling the Liberty Movement’s burning and growing flame.

As Ted Cruz and Donald Trump’s favorability numbers continue to spiral downward, we are reminded that establishment presidential front-runners continue to win nominations today, but they might stop winning tomorrow.

Why? They don’t stand for anything, and they are failing to make an intellectual impact on the hearts and minds of young Americans -- the individuals who will soon hold the reins to the Republican Party.

Status quo candidates -- although winning many primaries -- are tossed away and forgotten at the end of each election cycle. Liberty candidates -- although winning fewer primaries -- are educating the populace, energizing the youth, and growing a movement that will shape the Republican Party in the years to come.

Nowhere was this pattern more apparent than in Sen. Paul’s electric Iowa campaign headquarters. Some volunteers flew in from across the country. Some drove in from the nearby university. Some rented vans and picked up others from neighboring states. Regardless of how they got there, these volunteers came to Iowa because they were moved by Sen. Paul’s message. They came together because they couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spread their ideals and advance a cause that they wholeheartedly believed in.

The bond that these student volunteers had was like none other. Many of them stayed in what was dubbed the Liberty Frat House. It was located in West Des Moines, roughly 25 minutes away from campaign headquarters, and it was always booming with excitement.

Everything done in that house revolved around liberty. The student volunteers would frequently read libertarian philosophy books and debate the role of government. Even when they were just relaxing and playing games, they would make sure to add the word “liberty” to everything -- Liberty Poker, Liberty Mario Kart, Liberty Sandwiches.

The students had their eye on the prize at all hours of the day, even when they were just having fun.

This was the beauty of Paul’s Iowa setup. The volunteers woke up together, they drove into work together, and they drove back home together. To borrow the words of one student, they “liberty’ed for 24 hours a day, all day, everyday,” and they had a whole lot of fun doing it.

By late January, there were over 100 volunteers aggressively making phone calls in the crammed campaign headquarters. The average student made 500-700 a day. By caucus day, they made a combined total of 1 million phone calls.

What’s really interesting is how detailed and intellectually stimulating these phone conversations were. Sen. Paul’s volunteers weren’t trying to win their candidate support by mumbling run-of-the-mill bumper sticker slogans and talking points. Instead, they went for the kill in a full-throttled attempt to inspire the prospective caucus-goer with the power of his libertarian ideas.

In one memorable phone conversation, a prospective caucus-goer told a phone banker that although she agreed with Senator Paul on many issues, she was planning on caucusing for Bernie Sanders because he cared deeply about income inequality. In response, the phone banker proceeded to echo Senator Paul’s view that the Federal Reserve is responsible for much of the “bad” income inequality prevalent in the country today. After giving one of the most comprehensive 2-minute Austrian business cycle theory lessons in history, the young volunteer achieved the impossible -- he convinced the Sanders supporter to support Senator Paul in less than 5 minutes time.

Every time a caucus-goer voiced his or her support for Paul on the phone, the volunteers rang the office’s very own liberty bell. With every ring, the headquarters became electric with thunderous applause. The bell was rung often -- at least a few times every half hour.

Although the volunteers couldn’t garner enough support for Sen. Paul to win the state, they certainly made huge strides in convincing many Iowans of the importance of Paul’s libertarian ideas. And since their outreach strategy had more to do with the ideas than it did with the candidate himself, those points won’t just leave Iowans’ heads with the end of one campaign -- they’ll continue to marinate and help shape their future thinking.

Did Senator Paul’s campaign come up on top? No, but it did manage to win the hearts and minds of many -- especially millennials -- and it won that support with the power of ideas, not the power of personality or rhetoric.

You can’t kill ideas with a bomb. Ideas stick, ideas spread, and ideas grow. So while candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz might continue to win today, they will be forgotten by the end of this election cycle, just as quickly as past front-runners from previous election cycles. As the libertarian ideas popularized by Senator Paul’s campaign continue to be shared, the flame of the Liberty Movement will only rise and grow stronger in the years to come.