The best reason to take Rand Paul seriously is his campaign strategy, not his politics

But in fact, it’s the boring details of the organization that Paul is building that provide the best reason to take him seriously. If Paul’s views are unusually idealistic, the ground game that his team is planning is pure realpolitik. His staff is focused on the delegate math and party rules that could determine the next Republican nominee — a game-theory style of presidential politics at which the Paul team is particularly adept.

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The process by which presidential candidates are nominated is, at its most basic level, a race toward a magic number of party delegates — in the Republican Party’s case, 1,235 required to win — amassed state by state and, in some cases, congressional district by congressional district. Getting them depends not only on the speechifying, door-to-door vote-hunting and million-dollar ad buys we associate with campaigning, but also on a bewildering array of procedural minutia: obscure national bylaws that overlay a mind-bending patchwork of local rules that can vary drastically from state to state, some of which award delegates not based on votes received in primary elections but on back-room wrangling at local party conventions and meetings that take place weeks or even months after votes are cast.

You would think that mastering these arcana would be a priority for campaigns, given their importance. But even the best-funded, most-inevitable-seeming candidates mess them up all the time — and long-shot candidacies have been made, or at least sustained, by getting them right. Barack Obama’s Democratic primary victory in 2008 came in large part because his strategists understood the way delegates were being doled out state by state — even to the losing candidate, based on his or her share of the vote — better than Hillary Rodham Clinton’s team did.

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