Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) will be dropping out of the GOP presidential race tonight, multiple Republican sources told CNN.
The 2012 winner of the Iowa caucuses barely registered this time around with one percent of the vote.
The 2008 caucus winner, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, dropped out of the race on Monday night.
Santorum’s campaign is stymied by a lack of fundraising brought on by poor poll performance and a lack of a viable strategy to the nomination.
At the time he announces his withdrawal, Santorum is also reportedly going to endorse another candidate, CNN also said.
And the morning of the caucuses, Santorum was railing against Cruz to CNN.
“Out of Iowa, I think there’s a lot of conservatives who are going to be looking for an alternative to the folks that have coalesced,” he said. “You know, Ted Cruz was given big hole in the line to the play — in the football analogy that five people could have gone through. And he’s fumbled the ball the whole way and he’s not getting it into the end zone.”
Santorum advocated for voters to pick “someone, number one, who actually is a conviction conservative, someone who hasn’t changed his position on a bunch of issues.”
“And I think Ted Cruz has been outed for a lot of those. And someone who actually isn’t going to go to Washington and make the claim that the reason I can get things done is because everybody, Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservative, hate me. I don’t know how you think you can actually accomplish anything on any group of people if everybody, even people who agree with you, hate you,” he continued.
“People don’t hate me. The people on the other side of the aisle, when I worked in the Senate, they didn’t like me because of the positions I had. But they didn’t hate me. They were willing to work with me. We need someone who can actually work with people, both Republicans and Democrats, and get conservative things done for this country. That’s why the people of Iowa voted for me last time. You know what I say? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Don’t try somebody who’s been fumbling the ball all over the place, who complains about being attacked. Focus on someone who’s been through the war, stood tall, and darn near crossed the finish line with a win against the establishment.”
Santorum appeared at Donald Trump’s veterans fundraiser during the last GOP debate — he and Huckabee dropped by after the undercard debate — but stood slightly away from the podium while speaking as he quipped he didn’t want to photographed with the Trump sign.
Asked about Trump during his Monday CNN appearance, Santorum panned the billionaire’s lack of experience.
“Well, let’s put a nuclear physicist in charge of the Iowa State football team. Who’s he going to have to hire in order to run a team? He’s going to have to hire all these people who know about football. And that’s what we call in Washington the establishment. So, you bring in someone who doesn’t know anything, then you’re going to get a whole bunch of people who do know who are going to be influencing him,” Santorum said. “…The top two candidates in this race have no track record of ever accomplishing anything in Washington D.C.”
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