Kentucky hasn’t had a serious presidential contender since John Breckenridge, and, across the state, the idea that its 52-year-old junior senator, Rand Paul, will enter the 2016 race this week has his party’s faithful fired up.

Aaron Whitten invited 13 people to join him at the VIP reception when Paul announces he is running for president in Louisville on Tuesday. Whitten, the Grayson County GOP chairman and a friend of Paul’s from their service together in the Lion’s Club, laughed last week when he realized that his guest list holds twice the number of people who showed up at the first town hall he held for Paul back in the fall of 2009. “There were like six people, and three of them were my relatives,” Whitten said. “And two of them were Democrats, so I’m not sure that counts.”

Whitten, who told me he “met Rand before he become the Rand we know today,” was one of many Paul allies fondly reminiscing about the good old days, when Paul was an unknown doctor with a sort-of-famous father and a lot to say about taxes, big government and the Bill of Rights.

Paul’s ascent from Bowling Green ophthalmologist to the U.S. Senate and national Tea Party standard-bearer has been rapid, his time on the national stage so brief that it seems as if he’s been talked about as a presidential contender since the first moment he appeared on the ballot in 2010. He’s regularly won early-faithful popularity contests like the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll and made a name for himself with his fierce attacks on the Obama administration.

Tuesday’s announcement, just hours away now, seems a natural next step, and it has Kentucky Republicans “giddy”—to use Whitten’s word—about seeing their friend take his place on the biggest stage in politics. For many, it has been a long time coming. For so many Kentucky Republicans, the excitement has been there for well over a year.

Not long after I moved back to Kentucky in October 2013 to work for the Lexington Herald-Leader, I spent a day following Paul around Eastern Kentucky, curious to see if the early talk about him running for president had broken through the Washington echo chamber.

At those stops, there were no campaign embeds, no body men, no crowds of television news crews. But that lack of official hoopla didn’t quell any public excitement—parents bringing their children to meet the man who could be president. For a day, it seemed as if Eastern Kentucky was taking a turn replicating the diners and Rotary Clubs of Iowa and New Hampshire.

The first stop that cold and overcast day was in the poor town of Grayson, sitting in the shadows of the Appalachians. The local police and officials waited outside the Estep Family Restaurant, smiling and making small talk, buzzing with anticipation. The restaurant was dark and the hardwood floors were dusty, and on each table, between the ketchup and mustard bottles, a neon yellow sheet read: “Thank you Rand for standing up for the little guy. I won’t forget.”

After delivering an early version of his stump speech with remarks about the recent federal government shutdown and out-of-control spending, Paul went around the restaurant, shaking hands and posing for pictures. On the way out the door, Grayson Mayor George Steele shook Paul’s hand and, with a big smile, told the senator, “It would be an honor to call you Mr. President.”

Now, a year and a half later, Paul is about to take a giant leap in that direction.

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Normally, the announcement of a favored son’s presidential bid would be a state’s top news, but the kickoff of its junior senator’s campaign comes at a time when everything seems to be happening in Kentucky at once.

When folks asked each other all last week, “Are you going?” they didn’t mean Paul’s event in Louisville. They were talking about going to Indianapolis to see the then-undefeated University of Kentucky Wildcats play in the Final Four. (The Wildcats lost to Wisconsin in the semifinals Saturday.) Then last Thursday, President Barack Obama made just his second trip to the commonwealth as president, visiting a tech company to promote his high-tech agenda. The day after, a massive fire engulfed a General Electric plant in Louisville, and severe flooding gripped that city and other parts of the state. There’s no link between Thursday’s visit and Friday’s catastrophes, but in a state where Obama’s approval rating hovers around 30 percent, I’m sure you could find a few folks who see a correlation; many top Democrats, including the party’s leading gubernatorial candidate, skipped the presidential visit entirely.

Also on Friday, the majestic Keeneland racetrack here held its opening day amid monsoon rains, and we’re getting closer every week to the finale of the FX series Justified, which is set in eastern Kentucky. On the political front, four Republicans continued to traverse the state in hopes of winning the May 19 gubernatorial primary.

It’s a lot of news for a state that doesn’t often see much national attention. But through it all, Rand Paul’s steadily approaching kickoff has kept his Bluegrass State supporters excited. James Comer, one of those gubernatorial candidates, a longtime ally of Paul’s and the state’s commissioner of agriculture, said that as he travels the state, he is hearing an increase in the excited chatter about the announcement the state’s junior senator will make this week. “We’ve never had a presidential candidate in our lifetime,” Comer said. “I can tell an uptick in enthusiasm before the announcement next week.”

While Comer was an early supporter of Paul’s, Hal Heiner, a former Louisville Metro councilman who has taken the lead on the Republican side of the gubernatorial race, has been somewhat lukewarm in the past about Paul’s rapid rise. But on Tuesday, Heiner will be at the Galt House to hear what Paul has to say. “I think it would be great to have a Kentuckian as president,” Heiner told me at a campaign stop in Lexington last week. “I’d love to see Kentucky lead the country. We need leaders right now.”

Of course, not everybody in the state has jumped on what U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie calls “the Rand-wagon.” There are still lingering tensions from Paul’s first race, when he came out of nowhere to defeat former Secretary of State Trey Grayson, the man Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wanted to replace the retiring Sen. Jim Bunning.

Those tensions ebbed in the ensuing years, and they had all but gone dormant as Paul endorsed McConnell early in his reelection campaign, helping to ensure that a challenge against McConnell from the Tea Party never gained any traction. But earlier this year, those tensions returned to the surface as an arcane state law led Paul and his team to get creative in finding an end run around a statute that prevents Kentucky politicians from running on the same ballot for two different offices.

After a failed attempt in the 2014 General Assembly to amend the law with a “clarification” that would allow a candidate to run for two offices if at least one of them was a federal office, Paul and his team began looking for other options.

Paul’s team believed the law was unconstitutional, citing an old Supreme Court case emanating from a challenge to a law passed in Arkansas implementing term limits. Federal law should govern federal elections, the Supreme Court had found. But a legal challenge was a risky and expensive proposition on which to hang a presidential bid, given the advancing electoral clock.

So earlier this year, Paul sent an email to the state Republican Party’s central committee, letting the group know that when he appeared before it at the executive committee meeting in Bowling Green in March, he would be asking for the party to hold a special presidential preference caucus.

The idea was immediately met with skepticism, especially from McConnell and those who were loyal to him or had been in Grayson’s corner five years ago. Old battle lines were resurrected, and in the days leading up to the executive meeting, members not chomping at the bit to #StandwithRand publicly voiced concerns about the costs and participation rates of a caucus. Under their breath, state Republicans not allied with Paul used words like narcissist and egomaniac, while those firmly in his camp accused the others of trying to undermine the state’s rock star junior senator.

Paul allies like Jack Richardson, a former Jefferson County GOP chairman, were furious, telling me “we need to do what we need to do to advance the cause of a favorite son.” “If they’re afraid they’re going to have to get their hands dirty, then quit,” Richardson said of his fellow committee members. “Go do something else. You don’t have to be a member of the committee. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head.”

Just days before that meeting, Paul and McConnell met in Washington to discuss the caucus idea, and the next day, McConnell’s chief of staff called me to let me know that McConnell was throwing his endorsement behind the proposal.

After a two-hour meeting behind closed doors while reporters and staff watched Kentucky finish its regular season with a win over Florida, the executive committee voted unanimously to approve a caucus. While there are still skeptics, the tensions and press wars quickly subsided, and at least publicly, the party has largely unified behind Paul’s dual campaigns.

Kentuckians are still split: A Bluegrass Poll, conducted by SurveyUSA and sponsored by the Herald-Leader and WKYT-TV in Lexington and The Courier-Journal and WHAS-TV in Louisville, asked 1,917 registered voters in Kentucky about the course they think Paul should pursue. People who identified as Republican were equally divided over his decision to pursue both offices: 25 percent said he should run only for president, 27 percent said he should run only for reelection to the Senate, and 28 percent said he should run for both. Some 13 percent said he should not run for either office.

State pride has always been a staple of Paul’s two-campaign strategy. It was the driving force behind the decision, after conversations between Paul’s staff and former senior advisers to Mitt Romney, to put the campaign headquarters in Louisville. Invitations have gone out to Republicans across the state to attend Tuesday’s big announcement.

And to folks like Whitten, there is a lot to be proud of in a state that continues to suffer economically and where fires, floods and a heroin epidemic dominate the headlines. “People just don’t seem to have a lot of hope these days,” Whitten said, “other than maybe the Kentucky Wildcats.”

Whitten said he has noticed a “level of zeal” in the people he sees who want to talk about Paul and his likely White House run. “It’s kind of amazing for me to watch,” he said, comparing the enthusiasm to the passion for UK’s beloved basketball coach, Coach Cal. “They kind of perk up almost like I’m talking about John Calipari. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, Rand!’”

At the Christmas party in Bowling Green, Paul confided in Whitten that he was looking at an April announcement, but he stressed that he had not made a final decision about a run.

Whitten reminded Paul that the last time a Kentuckian took a serious look at the White House was 171 years ago, when John Breckenridge, the Southern Democrat’s nominee, lost to Abraham Lincoln. “I said, ‘You know they name schools after this man,’” Whitten recalled. “I said, you’ve got to take a shot at this.” It certainly appears that Paul is about to do just that.

And when he does, Whitten, Comer, Massie, Heiner and a host of other Kentucky Republicans will be at the Galt House to cheer him on. “The moment he announces, I’m gonna be like, ‘OK, Rand, what do you need me to do?” Whitten said Friday. “Because he’s my friend and he’s running for president. OH MY GOD!”

Correction: This piece originally misstated the last Kentuckian to make a serious run for the presidency. It was John C. Breckenridge in 1860, not Henry Clay.