WASHINGTON — Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, says that the decision to exclude him from the main stage Republican presidential candidates’ debate Thursday night in Charleston, South Carolina, is “a mistake” that keeps a “different point of view” from reaching voters, and that he’ll host a national online town hall instead of participating in the undercard debate.
“I think it’s a mistake for the Republican Party to want to limit the debate and make it smaller,” Paul told WTOP on Thursday morning.
“If you want to have a bigger political party, you have to have more diverse opinions.”
The senator’s campaign appealed to the party and to Fox Business News, which is televising the debates, on Wednesday, arguing that a recent Des Moines Register poll put him over the polling threshold for inclusion in the main stage debate, but he was denied.
On WTOP Thursday, he claimed that he is virtually alone in his party in the contention that U.S. “intervention in the Middle East has made us less safe, and allowed ISIS to grow.”
He also cited his stands against government surveillance of Americans.
“So I think it’s a different point of view, but I think it deserves to be heard, and I think a lot of voters are going to be unhappy that I’ve arbitrarily been excluded from the debate.”
Fox News says, “The FBN debate lineup was decided based on the results of national, New Hampshire and Iowa polling. To qualify for the prime-time debate, a candidate had to place in the top six in an average of recent national polls, or in the top five in an average of recent Iowa or New Hampshire polls.”
In addition to the recent Register poll, which he called “the most recent and the most recognized poll” in Iowa, Paul cited his $25 million war chest and more than 1,000 precinct captains committed for the Feb. 1 caucus — more than 60 percent of the statewide total of 1,681.
Instead of accepting a spot in the early debate, Paul said, he’ll go directly to voters by hosting the town hall on his website and social media. It’ll start at 9 p.m. Eastern Thursday, which is when the main stage debate gets underway.
“There’s the ability to go outside the mass-market media. … A lot of people are tuning out, and just tuning in on their computers, so it’s a mistake to sort of exclude the one candidate who’s very much embraced by the younger voters, and who can connect with the younger voter,” Paul said.
While Thursday’s will be the first of the debates without Paul on the main stage, he has lagged in the polls, with the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, for example, putting him at 4 percent, good for 7th place in the 11-candidate race. But he said he hasn’t thought about when or whether he should drop out.
“We’d kind of like to see what the voters have to say,” adding that he doesn’t consider polls three weeks before the caucus in such a large field very accurate.
“Polling has been way off in caucuses before,” he says.
As an example, he also cited last year’s governor’s race in Kentucky, in which Republican Matt Bevin trailed Democrat Jack Conway by five points with a week to go, but won the race by eight points.
“Thirteen points off with one week to go in a two-person race … we’re kind of crazy to attribute too much science to polling.”
He claimed his Thursday-night town hall will be more “substantive” than the televised debates.
“We think they’ll be lacking in diversity tonight, and whether people quibble over a bunch of nonsense that one man in particular from New York has to say, so be it.”
After the not-so-veiled reference to national GOP front-runner Donald Trump, Paul was asked whether there were any GOP candidates he couldn’t support if they were to get the nomination ahead of him.
While not going so far as to say he wouldn’t support the billionaire developer, he said, “I’m very worried if our nominee were Donald Trump, that we’d be wiped out in a landslide.
“ … I think that he’s an angry man who presents a worldview that I think turns off so many people in our country that … we’re in danger of becoming a small remnant of a party if Donald Trump were the leader.”
