(Bloomberg) — U.S. Senator Rand Paul, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, said the Republican Party would win more support from young voters by highlighting what he says are violations of privacy by the federal government, including the National Security Agency's surveillance programs.
"It's a message that can grow the party, and the party's got to grow bigger or we're not going to win again," Paul, a Kentucky Republican, said earlier this week on Fox News.
Republicans are looking to improve their showing after President Barack Obama won 60 percent support among voters younger than 30 in the 2012 elections, according to a national exit poll.
"Young people across the country are fed up with a government that says, 'Hey, the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to your records, doesn't apply to your cell phone,'" Paul said on the Fox program, referring to constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Paul, 51, is trying to build on the network of libertarian-leaning supporters that his father, former U.S. Representative Ron Paul of Texas, amassed during his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. The younger Paul has taken positions on civil liberties, criminal justice and foreign policy that differ from Republican orthodoxy, including his opposition to NSA spy programs.
"Lovers of liberty" can't always agree with the Republican Party, Paul said last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor, south of Washington in Oxon Hill, Maryland.
Paul won the event's annual presidential straw poll for the second straight year. In results announced yesterday, Paul got 31 percent of the votes of 2,459 straw-poll participants, about half of whom were younger than 26.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas ran second, with 11 percent.
The results are more an indication of the fervor of some Paul backers than a clear gauge of what's shaping up to be one of the most wide-open Republican Party nomination races over the last 50 years.
