Main debate

Rand Paul insists he'll be on main debate stage

By Nick Gass

Rand Paul says he thinks he will be on the main stage of Thursday's Republican debate. If Fox News makes the right call with its polling criteria, that is.

"We think we’ll be in the first tier if you count the polls," the Kentucky senator told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo on Monday, 11 days after his campaign boycotted the Jan. 14 undercard debate after he did not qualify for the primetime event.

Based on the criteria the network used to determine the participants, however, Paul likely would have made it had a Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Poll conducted in the same time frame as another included in the determining polling average been included. That poll, however, came out 36 hours after the network's deadline for inclusion.

As far as the Fox News debate on Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa, Paul was asked if he would again sit out an undercard debate if he is not invited to the main stage based on poll numbers.

“We’ll make that decision as it comes, but we think the polling data as it shows — look, yesterday, one of Fox’s own polls, we were ahead of two of the three people that were on the stage the last time," he said, referring to his finish with 6 percent ahead of Chris Christie and Jeb Bush in the latest Fox News poll in Iowa released Sunday. "So if Fox counts the polls appropriately, uses the polls and also understands science of polls, or the lack of science in polling, that if you have to have the margin of error, if someone is at 6 and another person at 7, and it’s plus or minus 3 or plus or minus 4 in the margin of error, you’re doing something that’s unscientific and unfair to exclude somebody who’s point behind somebody else if the margin of error is 3 points.”

The media is "kind of confused about how polls work," Paul remarked in the interview, attempting to explain the nuances of polling and how the media's reliance on the surveys is distorting the Republican race in favor of Donald Trump.

"It’s arbitrary — look, you guys just decide out of the blue which polls you’re going to use, you don’t announce which polls you’re going to use, and then you don’t understand what margin of error is — look at the recent poll — it’s plus or minus 5," he said, referring again to Fox's latest poll. "So someone who’s at 5 percent is no different than someone who’s at 10 percent if the margin of error’s 5. So you’re using polls in an unscientific way. It’s a real mistake, but it’s also a disservice to the voters because you are becoming God … you also ignored polls from some of the most prominent people like the Des Moines Register, which are polling in Iowa, live in Iowa, and showed me ahead of two of the three people you had on the stage. So yeah, I think you made a big mistake excluding us from the debate."

It is also a "real disservice" to the people working on his campaign in Iowa, he added, "to say, oh, we just don't care, because we're treating this poll as science."

"When in reality, the most recent polling, if it's accurate with Donald Trump being ahead, would show three times as many people voting in Iowa as have ever voted," Paul claimed. "So the question is: Are we really basing all of our news coverage on something — we show Trump from morning till evening, and he's getting 25 times more than all of the other candidates combined, all based on polling, but it's a self-reinforcing phenomenon. And really, I think we've dumbed down the debate as a consequence, where we're really not talking about substantial issues. We're, you know, talking about who he's insulted or called ugly."