Ron Paul

• 1. Introduction

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  Ron Paul delivered babies for decades in Brazoria County, Texas, and one of those deliveries was famous Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla. That detail captures something essential about the man: a doctor who never quite left medicine behind, a Republican who refused to act like one, and a politician who spent thirty years insisting the whole system was broken. How did an obstetrician from Pittsburgh end up running for president three times, on two different party tickets, and still receive an electoral vote at age 81 without even campaigning? The answers reach back to a German immigrant grandfather, a paperback copy of Friedrich Hayek, and a decision Richard Nixon made on the 15th of August, 1971.

• 2. The Doctor From Pittsburgh

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  Ronald Ernest Paul was born on the 20th of August, 1935, in Pittsburgh, the son of Howard Caspar Paul, who ran a small dairy company, and Margaret Paul, born Dumont. His paternal grandfather had emigrated from Germany, and his paternal grandmother was a devout Christian and first-generation German American. Paul has two older brothers, William and David, and two younger brothers, Jerrold and Wayne.

  At Dormont High School, a suburban Pittsburgh school, Paul was the state champion in the 200-meter dash as a junior. He went on to Gettysburg College, joined the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, and graduated with a B.S. in biology in 1957. He then earned his medical degree from Duke University's School of Medicine in 1961, completed an internship at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, and did his residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh.

  Paul served as a flight surgeon in the United States Air Force from 1963 to 1965, then continued in the United States Air National Guard from 1965 to 1968. After that he and his wife Carol relocated to Texas, where he built a private obstetrics and gynecology practice. Carol Paul had actually first met Ron at her 16th birthday party in 1952, when she asked him to be her escort. They married in 1957 and would have five children together: Ronald, Lori, Randal, Robert, and Joy.

  The intellectual shift that would redirect Paul's life came while he was still doing medical training in the 1960s. He picked up Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, and the book pulled him toward other writers, including Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. He also came to know economists Hans Sennholz and Murray Rothbard, whom he credits with shaping his study of economics.

• 3. Nixon's Decision, Paul's Entry

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  On the 15th of August, 1971, President Richard Nixon ended American participation in the Bretton Woods System, severing the U.S. dollar's loose connection to gold. Paul watched that decision and concluded he needed to go to Washington himself.

  His first attempt, in 1974, ended in defeat at the hands of incumbent Robert R. Casey in Texas's 22nd congressional district. But President Gerald Ford later appointed Casey to the Federal Maritime Commission, opening the seat. Paul won an April 1976 special election to fill it. He lost the next regular election to Democrat Robert Gammage by fewer than 300 votes, a margin of just 0.2%. He then defeated Gammage in a 1978 rematch and was reelected in 1980 and 1982.

  Gammage later explained what he was up against. He had real difficulty in Brazoria County because Paul had delivered half the babies in the county. There were only two obstetricians there, and the other one was Paul's partner. Political organizing could not easily compete with that kind of personal trust.

  On the House Banking Committee, Paul blamed the Federal Reserve for inflation and argued against the banking mismanagement behind the savings and loan crisis. He pushed for a return to the gold standard that the U.S. had maintained from 1873 to 1933, and he worked with Senator Jesse Helms to get Congress to study the question formally. He also spoke against the reinstatement of military draft registration in 1980, putting him at odds with President Jimmy Carter and most of his fellow House Republicans.

• 4. Building the Network

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  During his first term in Congress, Paul founded the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, known as FREE, a non-profit dedicated to limited government and free-market economics. In 1984, he became the first chairman of Citizens for a Sound Economy, a group founded by Charles and David Koch with the stated goal of fighting for less government, lower taxes, and less regulation.

  Citizens for a Sound Economy started a Tea Party protest against high taxes in 2002. By 2004, the organization had split into two new groups: the renamed FreedomWorks and Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, which became Americans for Prosperity. Both would become central players in the Tea Party movement from 2009 onward. Paul has been described as the "intellectual godfather" of that movement, a fiscally conservative coalition that formally took shape in 2007 and gained wide public attention in 2009.

  After losing a 1984 Senate primary to Phil Gramm, who had switched from Democrat to Republican the previous year, Paul left the House. His farewell address was pointed: "Special interests have replaced the concern that the Founders had for general welfare... It's difficult for one who loves true liberty and utterly detests the power of the state to come to Washington for a period of time and not leave a true cynic." His vacant seat was filled by former state representative Tom DeLay, who would eventually rise to become House majority leader.

  Out of Congress, Paul returned to medicine and also co-founded, with his former congressional chief of staff Lew Rockwell, a for-profit company called Ron Paul & Associates. Paul served as president, Rockwell as vice president, his wife Carol as secretary, and his daughter Lori Pyeatt as treasurer. The company published several political and investment newsletters, including the Ron Paul Freedom Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report, and by 1993 was generating revenues in excess of $900,000. Paul also co-owned a mail-order coin dealership, Ron Paul Coins, with Burt Blumert, for twelve years.

• 5. Breaking From the Republicans

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  Paul had been among the first elected officials to support Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign, actively campaigning for Reagan in 1976 and 1980. The disillusionment came fast. After Reagan's election, Paul recalled being the only Republican to vote against Reagan budget proposals in 1981. He was struck by the contrast: in 1977, Jimmy Carter had proposed a budget with a $38 billion deficit, and every House Republican voted against it. In 1981, Reagan proposed a budget with a $45 billion deficit, which ultimately came in at $113 billion, and Republicans cheered.

  By 1987, Paul was ready to leave the party entirely. His resignation letter asked a pointed question: "Since 1981 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?" A month after sending it, he announced his 1988 bid for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination.

  During the 1988 campaign, Paul called Reagan "a dramatic failure" and charged 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." His rival for the Libertarian nomination, Native American activist Russell Means, dismissed the greater fundraising by Paul's campaign, claiming Means was receiving ten times more press coverage and was therefore a hundred times more effective.

  On the 25th of September, 1988, psychologist and psychedelic advocate Timothy Leary held a fundraiser for Paul, which Paul attended. Paul ended up on the ballot in 46 states in the general election, scored third in the popular vote with 432,179 votes, and was kept off the Missouri ballot due to what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described as a "technicality." He returned to the Republican Party for his 1996 congressional comeback, saying plainly that he had never read the full Libertarian platform when he ran on it and that he worked for the Libertarians on his own terms, not theirs.

• 6. The 2008 Campaign and Its Aftermath

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  Paul formally declared his candidacy for the 2008 Republican nomination on the 12th of March, 2007, on C-SPAN. Traditional media largely ignored his campaign. But in May 2007, shortly after the first televised primary debates, the blog search engine Technorati listed Paul's name as its most frequently searched term. His campaign claimed more YouTube subscribers than Barack Obama or any other presidential candidate at the time. He raised more money than any other Republican candidate in the fourth quarter of 2007.

  In the actual voting, the grassroots enthusiasm did not translate into primary wins. He came in 5th in both the Iowa caucuses on the 4th of January, taking 10% of the vote, and the New Hampshire primary on the 8th of January, with 8%. His best result came in Nevada on the 19th of January, where he finished 2nd with 14% behind Mitt Romney's 51%. On Super Tuesday on the 5th of February, he placed 4th in almost every state, generally taking 3-6% of votes, though he reached 21% in North Dakota and 25% in Montana.

  By March, John McCain had secured enough pledged delegates to guarantee the nomination. Paul had captured only 20-40 pledged delegates compared to more than 1,191 for McCain. He withdrew his bid for the Republican nomination on the 12th of June, 2008. Some $4 million remaining in campaign contributions was invested into a political action and advocacy group called the Campaign for Liberty.

  At a press conference on the 10th of September, 2008, Paul announced support for four third-party candidates: Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party, Bob Barr of the Libertarian Party, Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party, and Ralph Nader as an independent. Two weeks later, "shocked and disappointed" that Barr had pulled out of the press conference at the last minute, Paul endorsed Chuck Baldwin for president. He ultimately received 42,426 votes, or 0.03% of the total cast in the general election.

• 7. The 2012 Run and the Convention Fight

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  Paul placed second in the 2011 Ames Straw Poll, missing first by 0.9%. He formally announced his 2012 candidacy on the 13th of May, 2011, in an interview on ABC's Good Morning America. In a June 2011 interview he said he would consider former New Jersey Superior Court judge Andrew Napolitano as a running mate if nominated.

  In Iowa on the 3rd of January, 2012, Paul finished third out of a turnout of 121,503 votes, taking 26,036 of them, which amounted to 21%. Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney tied for first with 25% each. In the New Hampshire primary on the 10th of January, Paul received 23% and came in second to Romney's 39%.

  His results then declined. He finished fourth in South Carolina on the 21st of January with 13%, and fourth in Florida on the 31st of January with 7%. He fared better in Minnesota on the 7th of February, finishing second to Rick Santorum with 27%. His campaign announced on the 14th of May that, due to lack of funds, he would no longer actively campaign in the 11 remaining primary states, even though backers including Peter Thiel and Mark Spitznagel had provided financial support.

  The real fight came at the Republican National Convention itself. Paul declined to speak, explaining that the convention planners had required his remarks to be vetted by the Romney campaign and demanded an unqualified endorsement of Romney. He said that complying "would undo everything I've done in the last 30 years. I don't fully endorse him for president." A group of 132 of his supporters had earlier filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the Republican National Committee and 55 state and territorial Republican party organizations, alleging a systematic campaign of election fraud at state conventions. Supporters also noted that delegations from territories with no electoral votes, including the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and Puerto Rico, were given prime seats at the front of the convention hall while delegations from Paul's strongest states were placed in the worst seats.

• 8. After the Ballot Box

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  In April 2013, Paul founded the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, a foreign policy think tank housed within his Foundation for Rational Economics and Education. That same month he launched the Ron Paul Curriculum, a homeschool online program developed by Gary North and taught from what it described as a "free market and Christian" perspective.

  In June 2013, Paul praised Edward Snowden for having performed a "great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret." In April 2015, he began appearing in infomercials for Stansberry & Associates Investment Research, warning of an impending financial meltdown tied to what he described as the imminent crash of world currencies. He predicted a market downturn again in March 2017.

  In the 2016 presidential election, a Texas faithless elector, South Texas College political science professor William Greene, who had been pledged to Donald Trump, cast his electoral vote for Paul instead. Greene's action made Paul, then 81, the oldest person ever to receive an electoral vote, and the second Libertarian Party member to receive one, after John Hospers in 1972.

  On the 25th of September, 2020, Paul was hospitalized after slurring his words during a livestream event. He later posted a photo from his hospital bed to Twitter saying simply, "I am doing fine. Thank you for your concern." In April 2021, his co-host Daniel McAdams revealed that Paul's daughter, Lori Pyeatt, who had been treasurer of Ron Paul & Associates years earlier, had died.

  A few days before the 2024 presidential election, Elon Musk publicly expressed interest in having Paul join the proposed Department of Government Efficiency under a second Trump administration, suggesting the department could cut the federal budget by up to $2 trillion. Paul said he was happy to discuss the idea with Musk but declined any official position within the new department.