Rand Paul has won the 2015 RLC Straw Poll held at the RLC National Convention spanning the weekend of October 8th-11th in Nashua, New Hampshire. The sold out event, with 750 attendees, saw an active presence from multiple campaigns.

Paul garnered 445 votes compared to his nearest competitor Ted Cruz with 399 votes followed by Ben Carson (139), Carly Fiorina (79), Marco Rubio (75), Donald Trump (54) and Bobby Jindal (51).

RLC Chair Matt Nye had this to say about the straw poll results: “This outcome is not surprising, Rand has topped our polls for some time and enjoys some of the support of his father’s activists. Cruz’s strong showing must come as good news to his camp. It’s a great time to be part of the liberty Republican movement. In the past we’ve had only one candidate to choose from, and this cycle we have two solid liberty candidates, both of whom are committed to defending liberty and the constitution.”

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National Advisor to Rand Paul, Mike Biundo, put the win in these terms: “This is a great victory for the Paul campaign. A liberty straw poll win like this requires both the strength of the candidate’s message and the candidate’s strength of the ground game. We are very happy to have both.”

For more on the RLC National Convention:

https://rlc.org/civicrm/event/info

UPDATE:

To see how “Approval Voting” facilitates vote totals being greater than physical attendance:

http://www.electology.org/#!IVN-Shows-Why-Approval-Polls-Matter/c17jj/560bfd780cf2a7bb74bf550e