Of those listed, Paul, though the Rand Paul campaign I expected has more or less been the Trump campaign aside from rhetoric and a few key policy differences.
Keep in mind, the whole newsletter controversy that originated with the elder Paul was the result of the paleo-libertarian movement, politically homeless after an early LP schism, attempting to attach itself and grow within the Buchanan brigades. Paul's longtime aide Lew Rockwell called it "outreach to rednecks" because they took David Duke's mailing list and replaced the respectable, legitimate criticisms of our foreign policy with conspiratorial headlines and anti-Semitic dogwhistles. Short term and politically speaking, it wasn't a crazy idea considering at the time how hopeless the movement must have seemed. Long term, with Paul's influence over an entire generation of rising young Republicans not being imaginable to him in 1992 when he himself was pondering a run as well, it has been a severe miscalculation.
So I was expecting Rand Paul to keep up with the family playbook, dust it off, clean it off, and update it. I assumed he'd run as a libertarian skeptical of TPP as a potential area for government expansion while I'd expected Trump to take a cartoonishly Paul Ryan-esque "free trade is good because muh Reagan!" approach. I assumed Rand Paul would be as equally skeptical if not outright contemptuous of foreign interventions, yet so far the only people who have questioned if we have a role in the Middle East is Donald "bomb the shinks out of them" Trump. I expected that he'd pivot to the right a bit more on illegal immigration because the winds of change in the GOP have made it clear that the base is, perhaps more so than on any other issue, permanently cynical about the prospects of their ever being some form of serious effort against it.
Rand Paul could have been Pitchfork Paul. But instead he tried to be a moderate Republican, a reliably Ron Paul style paleo-libertarian, and a Ted Cruz/Tea Party guy all at the same time. He alienated all three and by the time Iowa rolled around, he literally had a coalition that was overwhelmingly comprised of a rapidly decreasing base of college stoners who were probably more dispirited then I was at that point.
I mean seriously, Rand Paul didn't even get to drop out in style on TV or at an election night video. He had to release a rather sad 30 second video and then head back to Kentucky with his tail between his legs. Four years ago, after Ron Paul dropped out, we at least had Paulstock.
Ideally, I want the Rand Paul that I thought I liked, so I voted for him. But if we get the same Rand again in this hypothetical wank-your-fantasy scenario, then still Trump.
Paul would not have shot himself in the foot with Alicia Michado, Razib Khan, Gonzales Curiel, etc. (Of course, those controversies would not exist in this timeline, and instead Paul would be waffling in his response to his father's newsletters)
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