Paul told a nearly silent room that he might end up supporting immigration reform. Rand Paul's early state mojo

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – For a night, Eastern Iowa was Rand Paul country.

The Kentucky senator won a raucous welcome at the Iowa Republican Party’s Lincoln Dinner Friday, drawing an energetic reception that most declared presidential candidates would envy – let alone a first-term senator on an early 2016 scouting mission.


Paul observed as much when he wound up to tell a joke about the Federal Reserve – and the very mention of the institution drew jeers from the audience.

“This is an easy crowd,” Paul deadpanned.

Striking a relaxed pose at the side of the podium, gesturing casually in the air, Paul hopped from one breezy ideological riff to the next, more often than not earning a round of cheers.

( PHOTOS: Rand Paul's career)

A notable exception was immigration, when Paul told a nearly silent room that he might end up supporting immigration reform, unlike two prominent Iowa Republicans who denounced “amnesty” in remarks from the same stage.

“While I respect Sen. Grassley and Congressman King, we may not be on the same page,” Paul said, adding: “We may be.”

Still, years before the next round of presidential primaries, Paul’s confident performance here underscored why national Republicans tend to view him as a real contender for the next GOP nomination.

Put simply, if you designed a candidate in a lab to match up with the early GOP primary states, it would probably look a lot like Rand Paul.

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Strategists in both parties are deeply skeptical of Paul as a general election candidate, given his relative political inexperience and unconventional stances on issues from national security to drug control.

But in the momentum-driven early-state race, Paul begins a couple steps ahead of the starting line: He has an unusual national following and a reputation as a conservative warrior, a down-to-earth demeanor and – perhaps most important – an activist base left over from the campaigns of his father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul.

He already appeals to his dad’s fervent followers — who clearly helped fill the Lincoln Dinner crowd — but Rand also has a level of credibility with evangelical voters and fed-up mainstream conservatives that Ron never had.

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And as the GOP as a whole has inched in a libertarian direction, abandoning George W. Bush-style “compassionate conservatism” for a purer focus on small government, Rand Paul is among his party’s most fluent ideological advocates. Voters who know relatively little about him are at least curious to know the man who delivered that 13-hour filibuster on drones.

If Paul can weld together those constituencies, then veterans of past Iowa and New Hampshire campaigns say that puts him in something like a political sweet spot.

“Rand Paul could turn into five feet, eight inches and 140 pounds of early-state mojo,” said Dave Kochel, who was Mitt Romney’s top adviser in Iowa last cycle. “He’s got the uber-activists of his father’s organization in Iowa, where even a small base can be very potent. His ability to mainstream the liberty message is a good fit for New Hampshire, where voters are less interested in social issues and more interested in keeping government off their backs, and his southern drawl and Kentucky pedigree means he’ll sound like a neighbor in South Carolina.”

Kochel continued: “The only question will be whether he can grow a base outside of the liberty movement. We know he can capture national attention from a big moment like the filibuster, the question will be whether or not he can hold it over the longer term and start looking like a winner.”

Jim Merrill, Romney’s senior strategist in New Hampshire, agreed that at this “ridiculously early” stage, Paul “comes in with a couple advantages.”

“His father put together a very impressive organization here, a lot of activists,” Merrill said. “We have a funny, interesting blend of conservatism and libertarianism in the party right now. There’s a very strong strain of that here [in New Hampshire].”

In private conversations, Rand Paul advisers envision taking the Ron Paul base and broadening it to include Iowans who supported Christian conservatives like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, and Granite Staters who inclined toward the pugilistic Newt Gingrich. And then, for good measure, throwing in a batch of younger voters who may participate in primaries for the first time because of his explicit overtures to the next generation.

“Between evangelicals and, I would say, even a certain percentage of more established Republican types – what some consider establishment Republicans – they definitely would be more open to Rand than they might have been to his dad,” said Iowa GOP Chairman A.J. Spiker, who supported the elder Paul in 2012.

Hampton Mayor Shawn Dietz, who supported Ron Paul last cycle, said at the Lincoln Dinner that Rand’s task will be courting the disparate wings of the party without undermining his unique activist following.

“I think he needs to have a unifying message. There are strong beliefs on a couple different sides of the GOP right now,” Dietz said.

For Paul, it may be that the only path to the GOP presidential nomination involves racking up big victories in the early states and becoming, in effect, a political runaway train that cannot be easily derailed by establishment money.

As much as Paul appeals to the narrower constituencies that make up the Republican primary electorate, it is still unclear how broad his national appeal really is. That’s a less-formidable challenge for rivals such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who may lack Paul’s early-state activist base, but have been tested more rigorously as national leaders of the institutional Republican Party.

In a press conference Friday, the senator – who says he’s still undecided about 2016 – mused aloud about the virtues of the early states as contests that are “not just about television commercials.”

“I actually like the way that the primary system starts out, with two smaller states, Iowa and New Hampshire,” Paul said. “You know the old joke, it’s like: ‘I don’t know whether I’m going to support John McCain or not, I’ve only met him five times.’ ”

Paul and his advisers openly acknowledge that whatever his potency on paper as an early-state candidate, it will take years of work to deliver on that promise. They talk about Paul’s visit to Iowa this weekend as an introductory effort in the process of building a coalition that comprises more than the 22 percent of voters his father won in 2012.

Paul himself was plainly at ease in the living-room retail setting Friday, bantering with attendees about the difficulty of not going to the bathroom during his soliloquy on drones, describing himself as a regular guy whose Senate service is “an interruption of my life as a physician in a small town.”

But there were also one or two obvious gaps in his Iowa prep work: at that household reception hosted by the Iowa Federation of Republican Women, he stopped mid-sentence to ask attendees if Republican Gov. Terry Branstad had accepted the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid Expansion (Branstad did not.)

There’s ample time to close those gaps. For now, Paul’s getting a preliminary hearing from voters who shunned the Paul family last cycle.

Joyce Shiley, a senior citizen from Black Hawk County who attended the Friday reception, said she supported Romney in the 2012 caucuses but is now looking most closely at Paul and another insurgent senator, Ted Cruz of Texas.

“Romney cares about America and Rand Paul does too,” she said.

At the same event hosted by the Iowa Federation of Republican Women, Audrene Hansen of Polk County said she’s open to supporting Rand even though she found his father unappealing.

“I wanted to see how different he was from his father,” Hansen explained. “I wouldn’t have even considered [Ron Paul].”