Reaction to the abysmal failures of doctinaire hard-over uncompromising laissez-faire Capitalism is what gave the Democrats a death-grip on the Congress for most of the 20th Century, not that active Federal economic meddling didn't produce plenty of failures of its own. Both approaches, pursued inflexibly and zealously, will have periods of gross failure. Personally, I'd rather not have a fanatic devotee of either one.
The guy's positions on education seem contradictory. 'Reform education' is going to be pretty hard to achieve if you abolish the instrumentality that the Feds use to deal with the subject while backing big unions like AFT to boot. Really seems like a word salad where he's trying to sound like a Libertarian nutter and a Democrat union shill at the same time, and hoping people just notice the stuff they like in it.
The MMGW, open borders, and drug positions would've been enough to get Conservative base voters to stay away in droves, looking at those, it's fairly hard to see why he even ran as a Republican instead of as a Libertarian. I guess he was planning on pulling a lot of Democrats in the general election, but I think the Democrat who is running would have kicked his ass on that one. It would have been a blow-out like that stupid 'God told me to stay in the race' fanatic asshat Todd Akin gave us here in MO.