due to some shortfall of information, intelligence, or attention span there Four years ago, r/paul was a place to discuss ideas. Now, it seems like r/randpaul is a place to the discuss how unintelligent other people are. You want to know why Rand didn't get the support he needed? He took the "pragmatic" route of watering down the message, which clearly did not work. He's fairly young and new. That's a fact. Ron ran in '88 with virtually no success. He ran in '08 and did a little better. In '12, it seemed like he had a chance. It took time and hard work to get there, and it seems that the problem is your expectation of instant gratification, your desire for success without hard work over time. His supporters tend to have a superiority complex. Blaming the lack of support on "some shortfall of information, intelligence, or attention span" in others is to evade your own responsibility as a supporter. You are doing a poor job of winning people over, and a big part of this is the assumption that, if someone does not agree with you, it is a result of some defect on their part. In reality, people tend to think differently because they are operating from a different set of experiences. That's it. Do you not realize that non-Paul supporters browse this sub? The fact that every other post alludes, either overtly or implicitly, to their defective intelligence, turns them away. I was a big supporter of Ron eight years ago. He did not do all that well in '08 but, did we start talking about how stupid America was? No. We started talking about 2012. And, while he did not get elected, I would say the strategy worked. It set up a solid foundation. And now we're building sand castles on it and blaming others for our poor craftsmanship. Rand is going nowhere with supporters like this. Perhaps you should take a moment to reflect on your own summary of his values, like "responsibility, realism, and long term thinking."