Very few people want to be Rand Paul right now, unless those people are the three remaining G.O.P. candidates polling lower than him. Demoted to the undercard event during the last Republican debate, the Kentucky senator is embarking on a potentially quixotic campaign to convince the nation he deserves to make the main stage of Thursday’s critical debate in Des Moines, Iowa.

“We think the polling data as it shows—look, yesterday, one of Fox’s own polls, we were ahead of two of the three people that were on the stage the last time,” Paul said during an appearance Monday on Fox Business Network.

Fox News’s criteria for making the main stage Thursday requires candidates to poll in the top five in either Iowa or New Hampshire, or the top six nationally, depending on which polls are used. At the moment, according to Real Clear Politics, Paul is in eighth place nationally, seventh in New Hampshire, and fifth in Iowa, giving him a tiny, tiny window to make it in. (The polls must be conducted and released by Tuesday, when the debate participants will be announced.)

During the last debate, Paul, angry that he’d been excluded from the main stage, decided to not even show up to the undercard (“I’m not willing to accept a designation as a minor campaign,” he huffed) and held a town hall Q&A at Twitter’s headquarters instead. While he didn’t exclude a second boycott, Paul told Maria Bartiromo Monday that he was pretty darn sure the media didn’t understand polls, relying on some numeric mumbo jumbo to make this point to the Fox Business anchor:

“So if Fox counts the polls appropriately, uses the polls and also understands science of polls, or the lack of science in polling, that if you have to have the margin of error, if someone is at 6 and another person at 7, and it’s plus or minus 3 or plus or minus 4 in the margin of error, you’re doing something that’s unscientific and unfair to exclude somebody who’s point behind somebody else if the margin of error is 3 points.”

[. . .]

“It’s arbitrary — look, you guys just decide out of the blue which polls you’re going to use, you don’t announce which polls you’re going to use, and then you don’t understand what margin of error is — look at the recent poll — it’s plus or minus 5. . . . So someone who’s at 5 percent is no different than someone who’s at 10 percent if the margin of error’s 5. So you’re using polls in an unscientific way. It’s a real mistake, but it’s also a disservice to the voters because you are becoming God … you also ignored polls from some of the most prominent people like the Des Moines Register, which are polling in Iowa, live in Iowa, and showed me ahead of two of the three people you had on the stage. So yeah, I think you made a big mistake excluding us from the debate.”

Senator Paul could probably use more moral support from his father, former congressman Ron Paul, who recently acknowledged in an interview that it’s “realistic” that Donald Trump will receive the nomination. The elder Paul, a former presidential candidate himself, did note, however, that the polling is “generally rigged.”

Speaking of his son, he added: “I think he may well surprise everybody.”