Ditch bid

Pressure grows on Paul to ditch presidential bid

Party strategists want him to focus on a deep-pocketed challenger at home.

By Burgess Everett and Daniel Strauss

Rand Paul is crowing about making the main stage at Thursday’s Republican presidential primary debate, promising it’ll be his best showing yet. But as Paul focuses on his national campaign, now he’s got to deal with a major bummer on the home front: Deep-pocketed Democratic Lexington Mayor Jim Gray officially joined the race for Paul’s Senate seat on Tuesday.

While there appears little risk that Paul could lose in Kentucky, an expensive home state contest could leach resources the GOP would like to spend elsewhere. The question is how much longer can he run a seemingly quixotic campaign for president when he’s got a race at home?

Paul answered with a theatrical shrug and a “we’ll see” in a brief interview Wednesday night but sounded positively sure that Gray is no threat. He touted returning $2 million to taxpayers from his Senate office, his focus on the budget and a voting attendance record far superior to those of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio as reasons he’ll easily triumph in Kentucky.

“President Obama is so unpopular … people are really suffering from what President Obama has done for the state,” Paul said as he left a nomination vote. “I think voters of Kentucky will still support” me.

Republican strategists have been trying to pull Paul’s attention back to Kentucky since the fall, when his chances of winning the GOP nomination began sagging amid heightened concerns over national security after terrorist attacks and his libertarian leanings fell out of step with the GOP electorate. Nationally and in Iowa, his poll numbers haven’t cracked double digits since June, according to the RealClearPolitics poll tracker, and his campaign has become less about his big ideas and more about what debate stage he’d appear on.

Paul made it into this week’s main-stage debate but skipped the previous one after qualifying for only the undercard event, a setback stacked on top of lackluster polling and mediocre fundraising in the third quarter (Paul raised just $156,590 for his Senate reelection third quarter and reported raising only $2.5 million for his presidential campaign in that period).

Now Republican strategists say Paul can’t go far into February without making his life difficult in a race against Gray. Democrats, for their part, want Paul to stay in the GOP primary indefinitely to bolster their argument that Paul is out of touch with the Bluegrass State. Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Jon Tester (D-Mont.) put it this way on Wednesday, with a laugh: “I hope he’s the finalist.”

It’s not that Republicans believe that the party is in danger of dropping the seat. This week, Republican strategists said that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) remains tightly focused on Paul’s reelection, a major boon for the first-term senator. The two have had a mixed relationship over the past six years: Paul beat McConnell’s handpicked candidate in 2010, yet the younger senator’s endorsement in McConnell’s reelection campaign in 2014 proved valuable.

Last year the two battled publicly over government surveillance, with Paul forcing a temporary shutdown of key surveillance programs. McConnell has nonetheless stuck by his presidential endorsement of Paul.

“Well, I don’t want us to lose that Senate seat and Sen. Paul agrees with that,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), a previous chairman of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm. “Between Sen. Paul and Sen. McConnell, they’ve got the situation well in hand.”

Indeed, McConnell is a prodigious fundraiser, and money likely won’t be a serious problem for Paul as long as McConnell is keeping his eyes directly on the race.

Party insiders give Paul a few more weeks before things become truly worrisome. Their concern is less money and more about “making sure that folks back home don’t hate you for it,” said one national Republican strategist.

“When does it get really embarrassing?” the strategist asked with exasperation.

“Gray’s done a great job as mayor and is without question a very credible opponent. Rand suddenly has a very serious race on his hands,” said a GOP operative in Kentucky.

But the calculation for Paul is more complicated than simply getting a Democratic challenger. He and the state party have expended massive resources in rewriting the party’s rules to change to a presidential caucus state in March: How would it look if the state Legislature and the party went to all that effort for no discernible reason?

And then there’s Gray, a well-funded construction tycoon who’s considered to be a credible candidate, although few think he can actually beat Paul aside from the most optimistic partisans.

“Damn right. You heard it here first,” Tester said when asked if Gray can win. “He’s a great candidate, and I think he can beat [Paul.] He’s been out on the stump for president, he’s lost track of Kentucky.”

Indeed, national Democrats say Gray’s entry could be an additional drain to Paul’s already lackluster fundraising.

“[He] spent like $900,000 to win a mayor’s race,” a national Democratic operative involved in Senate races said of Gray’s challenge to Paul. “It also increases the pressure on Rand because obviously the NRSC must be hugely ticked at him for continuing this outrageous presidential bid.”

It’s more likely that Gray is part of the Democrats’ map-expanding strategy, designed to force Republicans to spend money in states like Kentucky, Arkansas and Missouri at the expense of incumbents in New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Kentucky is historically Democratic but highly conservative: The much hyped candidacy of Alison Lundergan Grimes against McConnell was a multimillion dollar disaster.

“It is almost impossible to find a legit path for Gray to defeat Rand statewide. The Democrats have been decimated in Kentucky and he’s at best a third-tier candidate,” said Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff for McConnell. “There really isn’t the same assumption of competitiveness that there used to be.”

Though Paul is drawing criticism for his poor presidential polling and his lack of attentiveness in Kentucky, he’s also in some ways in a no-lose position. He’ll have a national platform again on Thursday on the main debate stage, and Donald Trump says he won’t be there to suck up all the oxygen. And if he must finally pop his presidential campaign balloon, he’ll be favored to win reelection all year barring an unforeseen circumstance.

“I think that frankly he arranged a pretty good deal for himself,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

The National Republican Senatorial Committee hasn’t yet polled a Paul-Gray matchup, but national forecasters have yet to move their ratings for the Senate seat.

Republicans are eager to note that the Kentucky governor’s race resulted in a clean victory for now-Gov. Matt Bevin over Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway and that Paul himself was elected to the Senate with 55 percent of the vote to Conway’s 44.2 percent.

Still, the Senate challenge serves as yet another headache for Paul, who is constantly parrying questions of how serious his campaign is. It’s still not determined how much time he’ll be spending on the Senate race versus the presidential, according to Chris LaCivita, who’s serving as a senior adviser for both Paul’s Senate reelection campaign and his presidential campaign.

“Yeah, that’s not even clear. It’s not. I mean, I’m getting on a plane in two hours for Iowa because I’ve got a debate tomorrow night,” LaCivita said.