Ron Paul is an old man in a young man’s game. Were he elected to the presidency this year at age 77, he would be the oldest president ever elected. That doesn’t bother his young supporters, many of whom will be casting their ballot first time this election. Indeed, as observers of the live streaming of the Iowa caucuses noted, the people who spoke in favor of Ron Paul were barely past puberty–one mentioned his time as a congressional page–and this in an electorate where the average caucus goer is around 60 years of age. The caucuses are as much about persuading your fellow caucus goers–some forty percent of whom remained undecided as of that evening–as they are about being persuaded by the candidates themselves and sociologically, the tattooed, pot-smoking Paul fans aren’t all that persuasive.
To be sure, these young supporters are an awful lot like the young supporters who flocked to the consistency of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, conservatives who won the youth vote by treating it seriously and who understands that tomorrow’s politics . Youth likes consistency for the same reason that age is leery of it: experience. If you haven’t once compromised your principles, you probably aren’t a very effective politician or legislator. Indeed, sometimes a candidate can be consistently wrong. Of course, part of Paul’s appeal is that very lack of accomplishment. He has had only one piece of legislation make it into law. If you have no successes, you can’t be criticized for them by those who lost.
Alas these young voters didn’t turn out in the numbers they needed to place in the top two in Iowa, despite Ron Paul’s prediction that he would place there. Jay Cost, writing over at The Weekly Standard, has an age breakdown of the Iowa caucuses. The 17-29 bracket increased only four percent, from 11% in 2008 to 15% in 2012. The real shift here was in the group of the electorate known as independents, which grew ten percent from the last caucuses. Virtually every other factor was roughly the same, save that shift. The Iowa electorate, in other words, was slightly younger and slightly less conservative than in 2008–in a country where the electorate is ageing quickly and becoming more conservative. This stands to reason. Iowa, like New Hampshire, has been trending more and more liberal. In 2008, Obama carried them both by 9 points. (Still in 2010, independents trended Republican and there they have largely remained.)
This fact of two Republican early state contests in effectively Democratic states explains why Ron Paul continues to do well in the presidential race. There are fewer and fewer Republicans and more and more Independents casting ballots for the septuagenarian congressman. Paul inspires support among Democrats, too, who like his anti-war and anti-drug war stances.
This coalition is perhaps why Paul, despite the hostility that most Republicans have for his foreign policy, continues to build momentum. That, and his $13 million war chest, raised in the fourth quarter. (Liberty has rich bankrollers.)
But ultimately, his coalition’s makeup explains why he is going to lose the nomination. He is entering a spate of primaries and caucuses where only Republicans can vote. Florida, for example, which holds its winner-takes-primary on January 31, 2012, is a closed primary. As the race has more and more actual Republicans voting (and conservative ones at that) Paul gets into trouble.
Ironically, Ron Paul, a Republican candidate for the presidency, needs to build his coalition to include Republicans and he’s running out of time. Part of the problem is that while Republicans like Paul’s stances on most issues, they don’t like his tone in critiquing the wars. There is functionally no difference in the language he uses to say, that of Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore. Republicans have tired of military adventurism abroad, too, especially the white working class that will dominate this election. A CBS News / New York Times poll conducted June 24-28, 2011–the most recent we have– 67% of Republican voters wanted to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of summer 2012, and the majority 75% of Republican voters want at least one-third of U.S. troops withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of summer 2012. A plurality 41% of Republican voters want more than one-third of U.S. troops withdrawn in that period, 34% want about a third, while only 18% thought it should be less than one-third. It seems Republicans are naturally cautious of community organizing, whether it be in Chicago or Kabul. If Ron Paul’s acolytes tap this constituency, they win. But the language they use matters.
Paul is a bit like the GOP’s Barack Obama: different people see different things when they look at him and are more than willing to forget the inconsistencies in Paul’s views or their own disagreements with him. There is no such thing as a Ron Paul Republican. No one has run on that banner because no one other than Ron Paul can. “Elections are short-term efforts,” Ron Paul his supporters after dropping out in 2008. “Revolutions are long-term projects.” But this Revolution seems way too focused on Ron Paul to build the kind of coalitions necessary to win.
His son, Senator Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) of Kentucky, might have a better chance once his father exits the scene with all of his baggage. Rand Paul would never be so politically stupid as to say that he would have allowed the Holocaust to happen.
To whit: when Ron Paul elicited cheers after calling for a withdrawal of Afghanistan, his son, Ran Paul, standing directly behind him did not applaud. This suggests a kind of prudence that had hitherto eluded the Ron Paul Revolution.
But perhaps prudence is not lost on Paul the older. For that reason, Ron Paul will assuredly not run third party. If he did, it would force his son, the future of any Ron Paul movement, into an untenable position. Does Rand support his father or his party?
For the moment, Paul remains in the race to draw attention to his pro-liberty views. Expect him to use some of that largesse to draw contrasts with Rick Santorum, who is famously anti-libertarian. It’ll get personal between the two former legislators. By all accounts, it already has, with Santorum’s nephew writing in The Daily Caller in favor of Paul’s candidacy. “If you want another big-government politician who supports the status quo to run our country, you should vote for my uncle, Rick Santorum,” he writes.
The best Ron Paul can hope for at this stage is that the longer he remains in the race, the more likely we are to have a brokered convention. It is for that reason that Sarah Palin is right about not alienating his supporters. Alienated supporters tend to throw fits.
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