How Rand Paul trolls his rivals
Rand Paul has the most aggressive Twitter feed of the 2016 field, an account that emits a steady stream of snark, rapid response and gimmicks. A recent sampling: Hes suggested Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are conspiring, charged that Marco Rubio wants to build a moat around Cuba, and joked that Bush and Mitt Romney have exchanged friendship and charm bracelets.
Paul doesnt write the tweets himself: Roughly a half-dozen staffers have access to the account, and they post without getting sign-off from the the senator, according to Doug Stafford, Pauls senior political adviser. But he is deeply involved with his Twitter feed, driven by the sense that he wants to be a different kind of Republican candidate who reaches out to new constituencies and he sees social media as key part of that engagement.
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Its all part of a broader strategy to run a tech-savvy, crowd-sourced presidential campaign, where online communication is the first messaging priority and edginess is essential to cut through the clutter.
Paul frequently fires off emails to his staff with concepts for tweets and social media pushes, and sometimes offers specifics.
He and this organization will continue to be engaging, continue to be creative, continue to use digital almost as a first place of communication, because thats the world we live in, said Vincent Harris, the chief digital strategist of RANDPAC, Pauls political arm. The senator himself believes that content online needs to be unique, needs to be delivered not in long, paragraph form, but in pithy, visual memes and images and games. And if you look at the type of content the senators organization has been pushing out over the last two months, you see thats reflected.
Paul leads most of his Republican rivals in Twitter followers, with the exception of Sen. Marco Rubio, who started tweeting two years before Paul did. But Paul is the most prolific, delivering daily, sometimes hourly missives. So far this year, he has posted around 250 tweets (including retweets), eclipsing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Ted Cruz (around 200 each) as well as Bush and Rubio (about 40 tweets each). By that same measure, Clinton has tweeted only eight times this year but she has close to 3 million followers, trouncing all of the Republicans.
Paul is also without question the most aggressive of the White House hopefuls, frequently using 140-character posts to jab his Republican competitors and Clinton.
But other Republicans say that theres a fine line between buzzy and juvenile and Paul at times crosses it. Perhaps his most frequent target of late has been establishment favorite Bush, whom Paul regularly tweaks over his views on Common Core, the educational standards championed by the former Florida governor.
I dont think you want to be troller-in-chief, said one prominent Republican digital strategist who isnt currently working for a 2016 candidate. This might be how they think they separate from the pack, reach out to younger people. I just think its pretty close to trolling, which we think is weird for a regular person, much less someone who wants to be leader of the free world.
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How Rand Paul trolls his rivals