“I'm a New Hampshire voter, and our motto is 'Live Free or Die,' ” Emma Cating, 20, a college chemistry major, said Friday. “I am sick and tired of seeing presidents who ignore the Constitution, who take away our freedoms, who declare wars. I mean, that's not the president's place . . . It's time for a change – and Ron Paul is making a stand for freedom and the primacy of the Constitution.”

Cating and her partner, Muriel Crabbs, a lawyer, are true believers in a growing legion of voters and a broad base of contributors who have fueled one of the biggest surprises of the 2008 election season.

Launching a long-shot campaign as an obscure Republican congressman from Texas, Paul has tapped into a deep vein of anti-establishment sentiment and libertarian thought to leave an improbable imprint on the race for the White House.

Recent New Hampshire polls show him drawing about 8 percent of the likely vote in Tuesday's first-in-the-nation primary, and Paul won 10 percent of the tally in Thursday's Iowa caucuses – well ahead of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and only three percentage points behind Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson.

Even more startling, Paul raised nearly $20 million in last year's final quarter – a three-month haul second so far only to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's first-quarter total of $20.8 million among GOP candidates.

After having won only a minuscule share of the vote as a presidential candidate 20 years ago on the Libertarian ticket, Paul, 72, said he reluctantly acquiesced to the entreaties of close friends and supporters that he try it again – this time as a Republican.

“Actually, I argued against it, believing that the time was not quite right for a strict constitutionalist,” Paul said at a recent house party in Merrimack, N.H., a gathering which appeared to be divided evenly between committed Paul supporters and undecided voters with a libertarian bent.

An ardent opponent of the war in Iraq and a champion of free markets and personal liberty, Paul indicated that his initial hesitations were swept away by the urgency of the nation's problems and the fact that no one else in the race was advocating the values that have motivated his political career since the mid-1970s, when he began the first of his three stints in Congress.

“I don't like this whole approach to policing the world. I want this money to be spent here, and I want a sound currency,” said Paul, speaking in the folksy manner of the small-town OB/GYN he once was.

He pushed back against the claim that he is an isolationist, saying his foreign policy vision is instead founded on what he described as a doctrine of “non-intervention.”

“It's what the founders said we should do, and it works,” said Paul, noting that Vietnam emerged as a non-threatening economic mix of private and government enterprise once U.S. troops pulled out.

He insisted that South and North Korea would soon reunify as a peaceful nation if U.S. troops were to return home.

Warning that imperial overreach and fiscal recklessness would doom the United States to the sort of collapse that befell overextended empires of the past, he preached the virtues of a limited government, and of a society that exalts self-reliance and family values.

“People will take care of themselves,” Paul insisted. “If they can't, families can take care of themselves. If they can't, communities do, churches do.”

New Hampshire pollsters and political analysts say Paul has the potential to reawaken a disaffected constituency that powered the angry populist insurgency of Pat Buchanan, who shocked the GOP establishment by winning the 1996 primary here against the party's eventual nominee, Bob Dole.

But they note that demographic changes and economic growth in the ensuing years have greatly diminished the size and potency of that group of voters. Polls also suggest that Paul will attract supporters who would not otherwise vote in the primary, meaning his candidacy might not significantly damage his rivals.

At the same time, Paul's image as a renegade fringe candidate might discourage voters who are otherwise attracted to his message.

Interviewed after a McCain house party, Wayne Stickney, a 56-year-old store manager, said, “I love Ron Paul. He is very factual. He is everything I believe in. But he's not a front-runner. He isn't going to win the presidency.”

For that reason, Stickney said he is deciding between McCain and Romney.