(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) While talk of President Donald Trump’s 2028 successor has focused on his administration’s top brass, an outsider could decide to throw his hat in the ring despite being a long shot.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who unsuccessfully ran for the Republican nomination in 2016, is now mulling another bid for the presidency in 2028, according to an interview set to be released Sunday.
The 2028 chatter began after Paul lamented what he claimed was a lack of free-market ideas in the Republican Party.
When CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Robert Costa then cited a Washington Examiner headline suggesting he was running, Paul acknowledged he was considering a bid.
“Yeah, I don’t know yet. So maybe they know something I don’t know. We’re thinking about it, and I would say 50-50. We’ll make a decision after the election,” Paul stated.
Is Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) going to run for president?
“We’re thinking about it,” he told CBS News’ @costareports, adding, "I would say 50-50." Their interview airs this Sunday. pic.twitter.com/bwDlSkMTxt
— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) March 27, 2026
Paul’s comments come more than a decade after he dropped out of the 2016 race, where he finished fifth in the Iowa caucuses with less than five percent of the vote.
Politico reported at the time that he entered the 2016 race “essentially broke,” with nearly $250,000 in unpaid bills and $1.27 million in funds that were earmarked for use only in the general election.
In his CBS interview, Paul stressed his non-interventionist foreign policy views and cast himself as the lone free-market senator within the GOP.
“There used to really be a free market/Libertarian wing of the party, and now there’s not much left,” he claimed. “In fact, on many days it’s me in the Senate, the only one left for free trade.”
Paul has repeatedly found himself at odds with President Donald Trump, most recently as the sole senator to vote against Trump’s nomination of Markwayne Mullin to lead DHS.
Meanwhile, Trump has called Paul “a nasty little guy,” and on other occasions said his “ideas are actually crazy.”
If Paul enters the 2028 race, he would face steep odds against Vice President JD Vance and a crowded field of Republicans already polling far ahead of him.
A RealClearPolitics polling average, as of March 28, shows Vance leading with roughly 45 percent. The vice president’s lead is larger than that of his closest hypothetical competitors, including Donald Trump Jr., at 16.3 percent, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, at 12.3 percent.
