Time Magazine reports on Ted Cruz’s embrace of the Paul “liberty voters” in New Hampshire. Subhead: “The Iowa Republican winner appeals by trumpeting the gold standard, privacy rights and limits on eminent domain.”
Time‘s Alex Altman reports from Salem, NH:
Continue ReadingIn the hours after Sen. Rand Paul dropped out of the presidential race Wednesday, the libertarian state representative and passionate Paul supporter [Eric Eastman] says he fielded a personal phone call from Jeb Bush and an offer from Donald Trump’s campaign promising VIP treatment. Even an aide to Chris Christie reached out. But as he processed his grief over Paul’s exit, Eastman already had a new candidate in mind.
On the night of Paul’s exit, Eastman went to see Ted Cruz in Nashua, N.H. …. By Friday night, Eastman was onstage at a jam-packed Cruz town hall … offering his endorsement and telling the crowd that the Tea Party Texan and the Kentucky libertarian were “close cousins” philosophically. “Chapter and verse, the two guys are aligned in many ways,” Eastman explained in an interview.
This has been Cruz’s argument from the beginning, and it could come in handy next Tuesday in New Hampshire, where libertarian Ron Paul got 23% of the Republican primary vote in 2012.
[…]
On cornerstone libertarian issues—privacy, civil liberties, gun rights and others—the two freshman senators are largely in step. It’s why big libertarian donors like Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, have written big checks to Cruz four years after funneling more than $2.5 million to Ron Paul.