Rand Paul Gaining on Hillary, Losing Among Tea Party Voters

The Louisville Courier-Journal
writes up a new
Marist poll of interest:

First, the good news for Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul: he is gaining
on former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in a
hypothetical 2016 presidential match-up.

Now, the bad news: Paul is behind some other contenders in
support among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and
his standing in the tea-party wing of the Republican Party has
eroded considerably. […]

Clinton leads former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush 48 percent to 41
percent, tops New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie 47 percent to 41
percent, and has a 48 percent to 42 percent advantage over
Paul.

A Marist Poll in April showed Clinton with a 14-point lead over
Paul, an 11-point lead over Christie and a 16-point lead over Bush.
[…]

Among tea-party Republicans, Paul enjoyed 20 percent support in
Marist’s April poll. Now, that has plunged to 7 percent. The new
tea party leader is Cruz, at 15 percent, up from 6 percent in
April.

Assessing these numbers, the Washington Post’s Aaron
Blake concludes that “It’s
time to stop calling Rand Paul a tea partier.” Excerpt:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is the
most interesting man (or woman) in the Republican
Party today. He is known as a staunch conservative on
fiscal issues, but he’s working with Democrats on criminal
sentencing reform. He woos religious conservatives in Iowa, but he
also flirts with a more libertarian stance on social issues. And as
unrest continues in Ferguson, Paul said something no other
Republicans are saying: That the “militarization” of police is
harmful to African Americans. […]

While Paul is certainly aligned with the tea party on a lot of
stuff, the label doesn’t describe him as well as it does someone
like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). An op-ed Paul
wrote Thursday in Time magazine was just the latest example of
that. The things Paul said in it are not the kind of things you
would expect from a tea partier. […]

The trouble with Paul is that no well-known labels seem to fit
him well. While his dad, Ron Paul, is a pretty
straight-line libertarian, that’s not really who the younger Paul
is. He’s not an establishment Republican, a neo-conservative, an
arch-conservative or a moderate Republican.

We still don’t know what label would be better than “tea party,”
but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that this label doesn’t
really fit. Maybe he’s just a Rand Paul Republican.

While I agree with Blake that the term “Tea Party” is largely
amorphous these days, it may be premature to banish the author of
The
Tea Party Goes to Washington from the descriptor just yet.
As I suggested in my June 2011 cover essay, “The
Most Interesting Man in the Senate,” part of Paul’s project is
to shape and define the Tea Party as being essentially
anti-interventionist, in all senses of the term. That project is
obviously ongoing, though he’s arguably further along than he was
three years ago, despite that recent poll-slippage. (I would also
roughly sort the Tea Party blob into two camps: ideological [like
Paul] and comportmental [like Ted Cruz].)

As for the best definition of Rand Paul’s politics, I’d just go
with something like “pragmatic libertarian Republican.” With
“pragmatic” indicating that–unlike his dad–he’s actually running
for president to win, and looking for legislative solutions within
the constraints of modern Washington, as opposed to operating on a
more consistently philosophical/symbolic level. The “Republican”
modifier also meaning that, just like all the other GOP members of
the “Liberty Movement,” Paul is strongly anti-abortion and
personally conservative, while de-emphasizing (on every issue
except abortion) the federal government’s role in acting on those
beliefs.

Watch Nick Gillespie’s
recent interview with Rand Paul below the jump: