Third in the Ames Straw Poll wasn’t enough to keep going.
Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty dropped out of the race for the GOP presidential nomination on Sunday, hours after finishing a disappointing third in the Iowa straw poll.
“I wish it would have been different. But obviously the pathway forward for me doesn’t really exist so we are going to end the campaign,” Pawlenty said on ABC’s “This Week” from Iowa shortly after disclosing his plans in a private conference call with supporters.
The low-key Midwesterner and two-term governor had struggled to gain traction in a state he had said he must win and never caught fire nationally with a Republican electorate seemingly craving a charismatic, nonestablishment, rabble-rouser to go up against President Barack Obama.
I like Pawlenty. He’s a good man and was a good governor, but never caught fire in the race for the White House.
Update: It looks like there may be a Senate bid in his future.
Pawlenty was one of the few in the race with serious executive experience. He openly opposed ethanol subsidies (good for him!) and his foreign policy speech a few weeks ago showed a decent grasp of the issues. Sorry, the rest of the field fails to impress or could never win over the moderates and Independents that will decide this race. The few Republicans who might are either “not ready” (we can’t wait until 2016) or have elected not to run. If Republicans have no A-team in this race, just hope they capture the Senate.
– had already exhausted the “first in my family to go to college” line (till Trump shot it down); maybe, “I was born in a log cabin…”?
Minnesota isn’t too liberal to not have a GOP Senator. The woman he’d be facing this year (Klobuchar) is pretty popular so it might be better for Pawlenty to just wait until 2014 so he can unseat Al Franken, spend a term in the Senate, and run for President in 2020; if he so wishes. Although if Klobuchar’s approval rating dropped all of a sudden he could very quickly enter the race given that his campaign infrastructure and fundraising base is still there.
Owned by Bachmann. I want a right winger that make democrats howel. Like Reagan did.