Like many other Republicans in 2012, I chose to ignore Ron Paul and his supporters as just a deluded fringe element inside the party. “Surely, they can’t be serious,” I said. “No real Republican could ever support a buffoon who espoused policies so clearly out of step with the rest of the Republican Party,” I said.

I was wrong. In retrospect, it wasn’t the message that was attracting people to Ron Paul, it was the medium. Ron Paul’s followers believed in their candidate with a fervor that surpassed anyone else in the field that year because he offered them hope. Ron Paul supporters didn’t just have intellectual knowledge of their candidate, they had faith in him, and the Republican Party chose to ignore their passion. They believed that fever would break, and that Ron Paul’s supporters would find a home inside the Republican Party. They were wrong.

Politics is a game of passion, not position papers. Nixon was elected on the hope he would end the war in Vietnam and provide stability to the country in a time of great turmoil. Reagan was elected and re-elected on hope, and George H. W. Bush followed him to the Presidency because we hoped for more of the good times of the Reagan years. George W. Bush was not initially elected on hope, but he was re-elected because he offered a hopeful resolution to the Iraq War. Since then, Republicans have been offering up competent, successful party leaders, but not people who might inspire the belief in others that their lives were going to get better once they were in office.