Ron Paul - Political Party Identification

Political Party Identification

Throughout his entire tenure in Congress, Paul has represented his district as a member of the Republican Party. However, he has frequently taken positions in direct opposition to the other members and the leadership of the party, and he has sometimes publicly questioned whether he really belonged in the party.

Ron Paul voted for Dwight Eisenhower for President in 1956 when he was 21 years old. He had been a lifelong supporter of the Republican Party by the time he entered politics in the mid 1970s. He was one of the first elected officials in the nation to support Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign, and he actively campaigned for Reagan in 1976 and 1980. After Reagan's election in 1980, Paul quickly became disillusioned with the Reagan administration's policies. He later recalled being the only Republican to vote against Reagan budget proposals in 1981, aghast that "in 1977, Jimmy Carter proposed a budget with a $38 billion deficit, and every Republican in the House voted against it. In 1981, Reagan proposed a budget with a $45 billion deficit – which turned out to be $113 billion – and Republicans were cheering his great victory. They were living in a storybook land." He expressed his disgust with the political culture of both major parties in a speech delivered in 1984 upon resigning from the House of Representatives to prepare for a (failed) run for the Senate, and he eventually apologized to his Libertarian friends for having supported Reagan.

By 1987, Paul was ready to sever all ties to the Republican Party, as he explained in a blistering resignation letter: "Since Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party have given us skyrocketing deficits, and astoundingly a doubled national debt. How is it that the party of balanced budgets, with control of the White House and Senate, accumulated red ink greater than all previous administrations put together? ... There is no credibility left for the Republican Party as a force to reduce the size of government. That is the message of the Reagan years." A month later he announced he would seek the 1988 Libertarian Party nomination for president.

During the 1988 campaign, Paul called Reagan "a dramatic failure" and complained that "Reagan's record is disgraceful. He starts wars, breaks the law, supplies terrorists with guns made at taxpayers' expense and lies about it to the American people." Paul predicted that "the Republicans are on their way out as a major party," and he said that, although registered as a Republican, he had always been a Libertarian at heart.

Paul returned to his private medical practice and managing several business ventures after losing the 1988 election; but by 1996, he was ready to return to politics, this time running on the Republican Party ticket again. He said that he had never read the entire Libertarian platform when he ran for president as a Libertarian in 1988, and that "I worked for the Libertarians on my terms, not theirs." He added that in terms of a political label he preferred to call himself "a constitutionalist. In Congress I took an oath to uphold the Constitution, not the (Republican) platform."

When he lost the Republican Party presidential primary election in 2008, Paul criticized the two major political parties, saying that there was no real difference between the parties and that neither of them truly intended to challenge the status quo. He refused to endorse the Republican Party's nominee for president, John McCain, and lent his support to third-party candidates instead.

In 2012 presidential campaign, during which he acknowledged it was unlikely that he would win the Republican Party nomination, Paul again asserted that he was participating in the Republican Party on his own terms, trying to persuade the rest of the party to move toward his positions rather than joining in with theirs. He expressed doubt that he would support any of his rivals should they win the nomination, warning that, “If the policies of the Republican Party are the same as the Democrat Party and they don't want to change anything on foreign policy, they don't want to cut anything, they don't want to audit the Fed and find out about monetary policy, they don't want to have actual change in government, that is a problem for me." On that same theme he said in another interview, "I would be reluctant to jump on board and tell all of the supporters that have given me trust and money that all of a sudden, I'd say, we've done is for naught. So, let's support anybody at all ... even if they disagree with everything that we do."