Rand Paul is visiting another early presidential nominating state this weekend as a new poll shows the Kentucky senator leading the pack of potential Republican candidates for the White House in 2016.
In an interview with The Daily Caller on Thursday, the potential presidential candidate discussed his upcoming trip to Nevada, next year’s midterm elections and his thinking about a 2016 campaign.
“We’ll be — for the next year, year and a half — doing some traveling, going to some of the early primary states, talking about how we would grow the party bigger, what we would do differently if and when we were the nominee. That kind of thing,” Paul told TheDC, explaining a decision on a presidential run won’t be made until after the 2014 elections.
This weekend, Paul heads to Nevada, a state that traditionally holds one of the first presidential nominating contests. He’s speaking in Las Vegas to the libertarian conservatives at FreedomFest — billed as “the world’s largest gathering of Free Minds” — and doing a fundraiser for the state Republican Party. His wife is traveling with him.
“We’re going to try to help the economy out there,” Paul said of the state with the highest unemployment rate, “and leave some of our money in Las Vegas for them.”
Leading in Iowa
Paul’s trip comes as Public Policy Polling released a poll Thursday showing Paul leading the Republican field in Iowa in a hypothetical 2016 match-up. The same outfit released a poll earlier this year showing Paul leading potential Republicans in New Hampshire, traditionally the first primary contest.
“Well, I’m complimented by it,” Paul said with a laugh. “We don’t think that’s bad news.”
The lawmaker said he thinks his standing in the poll is the result of the issues he has been stressing in recent months — “standing up for the Bill of Rights or standing up against excessive drone surveillance or demanding that the president commit that he doesn’t have the authority to kill Americans with drones.”
“I think people are just glad somebody’s finally standing up on principle,” Paul said. “And even sometimes if the issue isn’t completely clear to people, they’re just glad somebody in the Republican Party has the gumption to stand up and believe in something.”
Paul said that when traveling, he finds a “real hunger for people who are unafraid to challenge the president, unafraid to challenge Hillary Clinton, unafraid to be affirmatively for something, as opposed to being defensive about who we are.”
“I think things like not spending more money than comes in is not a radical concept, but it should be something we adhere to in a vigorous and affirmative way,” he said.
Paul — who on Thursday introduced legislation in the Senate that would end foreign aid to Egypt — argued his brand of conservatism actually appeals to a diverse audience.
“I can go out and speak to Democratic audiences and have them on their feet, cheering me when I say, ‘not another penny to countries that are burning our flag,'” he said. “People really realize there’s a certain limit to how much money we have, and that we have needs and wants at home.”
2016 will be a family decision
If Paul runs for the White House in 2016, it would come the same year the first term senator is up for re-election. He says he plans to run for re-election to the Senate regardless of what he decides about a presidential campaign.
“I would probably only leave the Senate if I won the presidency,” Paul said, “so if I run in 2016 for the presidency, I would in all likelihood run for both. … We have decided and are telling folks in Kentucky that I will be on the ballot in 2016 for the Senate and then everything else is yet to be decided.”
His first ever run for public office — his 2010 campaign for the U.S. Senate — was a brutal one for Paul and his family, and he said that’s something he will be considered when deciding about a 2016 run.
“There are days when my wife and my kids would rather be more anonymous and would rather not be beaten up on things that a lot of times really aren’t fair,” he said.
“There’s a lot of sacrifice of family time that goes into this,” Paul said. “Then you get beaten up in a personal way and that does affect the way they look at it. During the Senate campaign, there were days literally when it would bring my wife to tears, the things that they were accusing me of, unfairly and falsely.”
Speaking of his wife, Kelley, during the 2010 election, he said: “They were saying things untrue about her husband and it made it mad, so she had her own press conference. So she’s willing to fight back. … I can’t do it unless she were to be supportive of it, so that’s something we’ll determine over the next year or so.”
The 2014 midterms
Before he decides about the White House, Paul says his political action committee — RAND PAC — plans to stay active in 2014, though no decisions have been made yet on who the PAC will support.
Asked about the Senate race back home in Kentucky, Paul said he expects Democratic candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky’s secretary of state, to have a hard time taking out Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell in the conservative state where President Obama is deeply unpopular.
“The president just re-announced another war on coal and if you live in Kentucky you consider that to be a war on Kentucky,” Paul explained, “so for the next every so often, every time I see or hear of Secretary Grimes, I’m going to be asking her to disavow the president, to come clean, and to say she absolutely doesn’t support any of his policies because his policies are a disaster for us in Kentucky.”
