Rand Paul has the most aggressive Twitter feed of the 2016 field, an account that emits a steady stream of snark, rapid response and gimmicks. A recent sampling: He’s suggested Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are conspiring, charged that Marco Rubio wants to “build a moat” around Cuba, and joked that Bush and Mitt Romney have exchanged friendship and charm bracelets.

Paul doesn’t write the tweets himself: Roughly a half-dozen staffers have access to the account, and they post without getting sign-off from the the senator, according to Doug Stafford, Paul’s senior political adviser. But he is deeply involved with his Twitter feed, driven by the sense that he wants to be a different kind of Republican candidate who reaches out to new constituencies — and he sees social media as key part of that engagement.


It’s all part of a broader strategy to run a tech-savvy, “crowd-sourced” presidential campaign, where online communication is the first messaging priority and edginess is essential to cut through the clutter.

Paul frequently fires off emails to his staff with concepts for tweets and social media pushes, and sometimes offers specifics.

“He and this organization will continue to be engaging, continue to be creative, continue to use digital almost as a first place of communication, because that’s the world we live in,” said Vincent Harris, the chief digital strategist of RANDPAC, Paul’s political arm. The senator “himself believes that content online needs to be unique, needs to be delivered not in long, paragraph form, but in pithy, visual memes and images and games. And if you look at the type of content the senator’s organization has been pushing out over the last two months, you see that’s reflected.”

Paul leads most of his Republican rivals in Twitter followers, with the exception of Sen. Marco Rubio, who started tweeting two years before Paul did. But Paul is the most prolific, delivering daily, sometimes hourly missives. So far this year, he has posted around 250 tweets (including retweets), eclipsing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Ted Cruz (around 200 each) as well as Bush and Rubio (about 40 tweets each). By that same measure, Clinton has tweeted only eight times this year — but she has close to 3 million followers, trouncing all of the Republicans.

Paul is also without question the most aggressive of the White House hopefuls, frequently using 140-character posts to jab his Republican competitors and Clinton.

But other Republicans say that there’s a fine line between buzzy and juvenile — and Paul at times crosses it. Perhaps his most frequent target of late has been establishment favorite Bush, whom Paul regularly tweaks over his views on Common Core, the educational standards championed by the former Florida governor.

“I don’t think you want to be troller-in-chief,” said one prominent Republican digital strategist who isn’t currently working for a 2016 candidate. “This might be how they think they separate from the pack, reach out to younger people. … I just think it’s pretty close to trolling, which we think is weird for a regular person, much less someone who wants to be leader of the free world.”

In fact, the Paul camp does see Twitter as a way to reach constituencies that typically don’t vote Republican, like young people and the tech community. Paul, whose team will be opening political offices in the tech hubs of Austin and Silicon Valley, personally encourages constant innovation in how the team does digital outreach — and “a little lightheartedness” can only help, Stafford said.

Harris maintains that Paul’s humor drives the content, even though in person Paul’s approach is often more wry and understated than the aggressive tweets would suggest. Still, both on and offline, Paul doesn’t hesitate to make jokes or jab at his opponents, and digital experts on both sides of the aisle stress that such consistency is important. One of the worst things a candidate can do on the tech front, they say, is allow for a major disconnect to develop between the digital and real-life personas.

“[It’s] very fair to say he is very, very engaged himself on witty content,” Harris said. “I’d say he’s definitely got a very active sense of humor. … He likes using digital as [regular] people like to use digital: not just shoving out uninteresting content.”

Over the weekend, in time for the Super Bowl, Paul tweeted out instructions for making a paper “liberty” football, bearing the slogan “Rand 2016.” Last week he tweeted a link to a fake recording of a conversation between Bush and Clinton. And on countless occasions, he has used the platform to take swipes at his political adversaries: Bush, Romney and Clinton are all #thingstorunfrom; the long list of Democrats who lost on Election Day are #HillarysLosers. It’s a great way to energize his base, digital experts say — though that approach has other Republicans rolling their eyes.

“It’s a little infantile,” emailed Ana Navarro, a Florida Republican and Bush ally. “Picking fights with other Republicans — Christie, Cruz, Rubio, Jeb — seems to be one of Senator Paul’s favorite pastimes and a way to call attention to himself.”

Bush’s spokeswoman, Kristy Campbell, didn’t respond to a request for comment. But last month she jumped into one of Paul’s Twitter sessions, correcting the spelling of a Paul tweet that dissed Common Core.

“You misspelled friendship. Maybe there is something to be said for higher standards?”she tweeted.

Stafford maintains that the Twitter efforts are generally “positive about Rand” and are used only on “occasion” to “contrast with other Republicans.” Regardless, they are part of the broader desire to build a “crowd-sourced” 2016 campaign. The eventual aim is to get supporter input — through Twitter and other online engagement — on everything from the tools used by campaign volunteers, to what T-shirts and bumper stickers look like.

But the intense focus on Twitter is also fueled by the belief that it’s difficult to break through in today’s packed, nonstop news cycle —a challenge that will only intensify in a presidential field that could see two dozen Republican candidates. If stirring controversy is a way to stand out, that’s fine with the team.

“The goal [is] branding,” said Harris, who previously worked with the firebrand Cruz on digital. “We live in a 24-second news cycle. And it’s important to insert yourself into that news cycle.”

If that’s the metric, Paul can point to plenty of successes.

In December, for example, he took to Twitter to slam Rubio (R-Fla.) over Cuba policy, after the Cuban-American potential 2016 rival bashed Paul’s support for normalizing relations with that country. Paul issued a series of tweets suggesting Rubio is an “isolationist” and later built off those missives to publish an op-ed. The move generated headlines and offered Paul a way to promote his policies, deliver rapid response and attempt to score political points.

A Rubio spokesman declined to comment on Paul’s Twitter activity.

Daniel Kreiss, a professor at the University of North Carolina who is an expert on digital strategy in political campaigns, said Paul has some space to experiment online. He noted that the only people likely to be scrutinizing his Twitter account at this point are reporters and his supporters, and said the tool can effectively generate enthusiasm with the latter and with other younger voters.

“The danger would be, you would start a journalistic conversation that would spill off into a more widespread audience … and the narrative then becomes, ‘You’re looking unpresidential.’ But I think more generally Twitter is a good place for things like sarcasm and snark,” Kreiss said, noting that the Obama campaign often deployed that effectively in 2012. He added, “It’s social media; it can be snarky and humorous in ways other genres of political discourse don’t allow for.”

Betsy Hoover, who in 2012 directed digital organizing for the Obama for America campaign, said she wouldn’t advise hitting potential opponents so extensively through Twitter this early in the campaign. But she gave Paul plaudits for breaking through.

“It’s interesting,” she said. “It’s definitely getting attention, for better or worse. The fact that it’s his own, it’s consistent, is a step in the right direction. … Is this how I would use it? I don’t know, but it’s consistent and making a splash and that’s something.”

Harris said Paul has given his political team a straightforward mandate when it comes to social media.

“You’ve got to be engaging, you’ve got to be entertaining,” Harris said. “ You’ve got to be different.”