MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. ? Jon Huntsman will drop out of the GOP presidential race Monday morning and endorse Mitt Romney, POLITICO has confirmed.
Huntsman will endorse Romney in a speech at 11 a.m. Monday at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center.
Continue ReadingThe move will come at the start of the final week before the Jan. 21 South Carolina primary ? which Romney?s hoping to win and clinch the nomination.
Huntsman?s exit comes less than a week after he claimed victory from his third-place finish in the New Hampshire primary, the contest he?d staked his candidacy on ever since entering the race last summer. Huntsman experienced a surge of support in the closing days before that vote, but he still fell well short of Ron Paul ? and even further behind Romney, whom he?d sniped at in the closing days.
A source said that Huntsman?s rationale for now backing Romney, who he has criticized for weeks on the campaign trail as lacking a ?core,? is that he didn?t want to block the person best prepared in the field to beat Obama, and then to lead the country and grapple with the economy.
?Jon Huntsman is proud of the campaign he ran and the message of restoring trust in Washington,? said a campaign official familiar with his thinking. ?He didn?t want to stand in the way of the candidate most likely to beat Barack Obama and turn the economy around. That?s Mitt Romney.?
Although Huntsman was only polling at about 5 percent in South Carolina, his voters are most likely to wind up with Romney. If either Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum makes a run at the frontrunner in the final week, those handful of votes that otherwise would?ve gone to Huntsman could prove pivotal.
Huntsman officials are very much cognizant of this and, in an effort to be seen as team players for the likely nominee, suggested it played into the candidate?s decision to get out now instead of after the primary Saturday.
The other calculation besides wanting to offer an olive branch to Romney: Huntsman would not be able to control coverage of his departure following the vote because it?s assumed Rick Perry?s expected withdrawal would compete for attention.
A source close to the campaign said some of Huntsman?s advisers attempted to talk him out of the decision, urging the former ambassador to at least wait until after the South Carolina primary this Saturday. It was just today that he got the endorsement of The State, South Carolina?s largest newspaper.
?It was entirely a family decision,? said the source.
But the decision was brewing for days: Though Huntsman last week called his New Hampshire finish ?a ticket to ride,? it wasn?t sufficient to stay alive.
?It was too little too late,? said a top official of their New Hampshire finish.
Fom a practical standpoint, Huntsman?s candidacy was all but finished. The campaign had no money for TV and radio ads or even direct mail pieces this coming week, according to a campaign source.
?South Carolina had no real budget,? said the source.
Though Huntsman spent the last few days in South Carolina and fundraising in New York, a top campaign official said they realized they had to call it quits when it became evident they had gotten no bump out of New Hampshire.
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