I don't really see much of a path for him tbh
Paul would have attracted an Evan McMullin neocon-esque third party opponent.
RON Paul (not Rand) had several major drawbacks as a Republican candidate in 2012. One problem he had was that the GOP was not ready to repudiate the Bush Foreign Policy. Another problem was that the GOP was simply not as anti-interventionist as Ron Paul was/is. His positions on these issues placed him at odds with the bulk of the GOP.
But the BIGGEST drawback for Ron Paul was the simple fact that Ron Paul rarely endorsed the GOP National Ticket. He never endorsed either Bush. He gave a tepid endorsement to Bob Dole in 1996 when he was making a comeback as a Republican. But he didn't endorse McCain in 2008 (he endorsed Constitution Party nominee Chuck Baldwin) and he didn't endorse Romney in 2012.
In his way, Ron Paul was a Republican whose relationship to the party was akin to the relationship George Wallace had with the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party cared about what Wallace said and did, in particular with regard to the Presidential ticket. Wallace didn't endorse McGovern, but this was because he viewed such a move as something that would cause both he and McGovern to lose credibility with their supporters. (Wallace hated Nixon; he did NOT endorse Nixon, he probably voted for McGovern in the privacy of the voting booth, and he privately believed that Nixon sponsored his attempted assassination.) The Democratic Party allowed George Wallace to speak on their 1974 telethon where they pushed for money. (I actually remember HHH actually calling Wallace a "great Democrat" on national TV.) The party put Mickey Griffin (Wallace's 1972 Political Director) on the Democratic National Committee, and he was a pretty influential member of the DNC for a while. But Wallace was NEVER going to be the Presidential nominee, or even the VP nominee, simply because his views were too far, even then, from the Democratic mainstream.
That's Ron Paul's problem with the GOP. Indeed, George Wallace was happier about being a Democrat than Ron Paul is with being a Republican, all things considered. Neither party is going to put on its national ticket a candidate who has conspicuously not supported it as some point in their career. Indeed, if Nelson Rockefeller had given a tepid endorsement to Goldwater in 1964 instead of remaining conspicuously neutral, he probably wouldn't have been forced from the ticket in 1976.
