Building off a post below, Rand Paul's attempts to re position himself as a more moderate Republican in order to make himself more electable - which he claims to be - might be turning off the libertarians. They already suspicious of the Republican Party.
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Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s presidential campaign is less than a day old but already suffers from an identity crisis. Paul wants to win, but he can only do so if he is seen as more mainstream than his father, Ron Paul, who ran for president in 2008 and 2012. At the same time, Paul can’t completely jettison the far-left and far-right positions that have made him a hero to the substantial number of Republican libertarians who made up his father’s base.
In Paul’s dream world, he’ll satisfy everyone. In the most likely real world, he’ll end up satisfying no one.
The most obvious path for Paul to win the GOP nomination is to build on the 21 percent of the vote his father earned in Iowa in 2012, and the 23 percent Paul Sr. picked up in New Hampshire that year. In a divided primary field, that might not seem so difficult; 25 percent might be enough to win both states. And with wins in the first two contests, Paul might be able to ride the Big Mo’ to the nomination.
But right now, Paul isn’t anywhere close to where his father ended up in either state in 2012. Paul is polling at a little less than 9 percent in Iowa and nearly 11 percent in New Hampshire.
. . . We’ll see a lot of ups and downs in the 2016 campaign, but there’s reason to read more into Paul’s recent polling slide, as he’s spent the last year trying to increase his appeal with the GOP establishment, particularly on foreign policy.
When was the last time you heard Paul accused of being an isolationist? He used to advocate for cutting foreign aid to Israel, but now he offers pro-Israeli bill after pro-Israeli bill to cut off funding to the Palestinians. He once seemed to favor President Obama’s diplomatic overtures to Iran, but he signed Sen. Tom Cotton’s letter aimed at hurting those negotiations. Paul was once reluctant to get involved in fighting the Islamic State, but he now wants more airstrikes.
There really isn’t good public data on the views of libertarian Republican voters, but interviews and internal polls suggest that Paul’s evolution on foreign policy has been too successful in separating him from his father, and has eroded his libertarian credentials. Ron Paul’s 2012 Iowa campaign chairman Drew Ivers would “prefer if [Rand Paul] had a different strategy” than “meeting [mainstream Republicans] in the middle.” Aaron Day of the libertarian Free State movement in New Hampshire sees less enthusiasm for Rand Paul than for his dad.
