Ron Paul Endorsement of Romney? ‘Not Soon’
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With virtually zero chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination, Rep. Ron Paul said Tuesday that he has no immediate plans to endorse Mitt Romney.
“Not soon,” he said on CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report.”
“I’m not thinking about that as much as what kind of presence we’ll have, how many people we’re going to have there, and what kind of an influence we can have on the platform in Tampa,” he added, noting that there were still plenty of delegates still up for grabs. “It may turn out that we may end up winning Iowa, and we’ve won a couple of these other states.”
Romney, the presumptive nominee who received the endorsement of No. 2 contender Rick Santorum this week, has 856 of the 1,144 delegates needed to lock up the spot.
Santorum held 257 delegates before dropping out of the race.
By contrast, Paul holds 94 delegates.
Although a recent poll shows Paul garnering 13 percent of the vote in a three-way race between him, Romney and President Obama, the Republican Congressman from Texas quashed any talk of making a presidential bid as an independent.
“I don’t have any plans for that,” Paul said.
Asked by host Larry Kudlow about the strength of his support from independents and Democrats, Paul said his policies resonated with a broad array of voters. That's part of the reason, he said, that his appearances on college campuses often draw crowds of up to 8,000.
“The plain truth is that this is this philosophy of freedom and individual liberty and limited government is appealing to independents and moderates and even progressive Democrats when it comes to civil liberties and a foreign policy,” he said. “So there’s nothing automatic about my appeal only being to Republicans.”
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