Everybody’s loving Rand Paul. He’s the CPAC 2016 champion, the top 2016 pick in the straw poll at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference in NH, and now he’s claiming the ‘Paul’ name for himself by taking top marks in a national poll from CNN/ORC International. He’s outdoing his father, Ron Paul, and showing that he’s a strong candidate for 2016. While Rand jokes that it’s making him more of a target, if he decides to take a presidential election serious, there’s one thing he can’t joke about: Hillary Clinton.

He’s winning polls as the top 2016 pick but so is Hillary Clinton. With 63% of votes from Democrats and left-leaning independents, Clinton is THE Democratic nominee, according to a recent CNN/ORC International survey. Paul, in comparison, took the top spot with 16% on the Republican side of that survey. Sixty-three percent to sixteen percent, whew. If Paul gets the Republican nomination, will he be able to survive a presidential showdown with Clinton?

It doesn’t look like Democrats are letting Benghazi get in the way of their vote, but it’ll ultimately be up to the American people to give the final verdict. While Hillary might win in two demographics (minority and women) that the GOP tends to be weak in, Rand’s attracting the youth vote. He’s got something that Hillary Clinton will never have: “outsider” status.

“Clinton represents the intersection of money and political power, which so many voters have come to distrust,” says John J. Pitney Jr., a political professor from Claremont McKenna College in California. Indeed, there are few politicians in either party who are perceived as being part of the entrenched Washington establishment more than Clinton is, writes Dana Liebelson of The Week. In that view, Paul’s “outsider” status could be a huge advantage.

Perhaps Paul’s biggest strength in this hypothetical campaign would be that “he does not look like, act like, or talk like a conventional politician,” says Stephen Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky. “

We don’t need a poll to tell us just how important Hillary Clinton is, but who will Americans choose in 2016? I was under the impression we were looking for someone different, someone we can stand behind. Is Rand Paul the one or will 2016 spell out something different?

Show your support for your top 2016 pick below or on Facebook. If you don’t say something now, you better not complain later!

 
(Photo courtesy of rharrison, via Flickr Creative Commons C BY-SA 2.0)

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