Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul told
Newsmax TV on Friday that he won the debate in Des Moines on Thursday and that "we ought to use this as a model going forward."
"Donald Trump gets to have a separate rally and then the adults in the room get to debate," the Kentucky senator told "The Hard Line" host Ed Berliner. "This was the best debate by far."
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Trump boycotted the contest in a rift with Fox News over co-moderator Megyn Kelly. He instead held a rally across town to raise money for veteran's organizations.
"It was great being on the main stage," said Paul, who refused to participate in the South Carolina debate two weeks ago because he was relegated to the undercard debate. "It was great being able to mix it up.
"The perspective I bring to the debate is unique. I am the only fiscal conservative on the stage as well — the only one who's willing to say, if you truly believe in balancing the budget, truly believe that the debt is a problem, you have to hold the line on all spending.
"You can't be for increasing military spending $1 trillion and still pretend to be a conservative."
He said he exposed rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio's about-face on immigration, particularly the Texas senator's "sanctimony" on the issue.
"With regards to Ted Cruz, he wants to paint everybody in the whole country as being for amnesty except for himself," Paul told Berliner. "But if you look closely at the debate over the immigration bill, he was for the bill as long as it didn't include citizenship.
"That's similar to the position I hold and held at the time, but he claims never to have held the position — and there's a little bit of sanctimony in the sense that he wants people to believe that he is the only true conservative out there against amnesty.
"But in reality, once we start getting into different definitions of what amnesty is, I think we dumb down the debate and we don't actually get to a point where we're usefully trying to fix the problem."
He told Berliner that the only way to dismiss talk that Trump won Thursday's debate regardless — and continues to hold on to his lead in the polls — is "to have an election."
Iowa holds its caucuses on Monday in the first contest of the 2016 presidential election cycle.
"When we have the election on Monday, it's going to be a little hard for the media to continue to defend polling, the election doesn't come even close to representing the polling," Paul said.
"Maybe we should discount polling, just listen to what the candidates have to say and see what the voters decide. Then, we can keep the punditry to a minimum and have the punditry basically after we've had the election."
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