This is Why Rand Dropped Out

Politico has a pretty decent battlefield report explaining why Rand has ended his campaign:

Rand Paul dropped out of the 2016 president race on Wednesday, short on cash and support, two days after finishing with under 5 percent in the Iowa caucuses — less than one quarter of the support his father had drawn four years earlier...

His moment in the 2016 campaign never materialized....

For months, Paul struggled to gain traction or garner attention in a race that has been dominated by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Paul hadn’t registered in double digits in any national poll since May, after he had led some surveys in 2014 and had been declared the “most interesting man” in Republican politics.

Paul had initially been viewed as a stronger contender than his father, former Rep. Ron Paul, who ran for president in 2008 and 2012 on a narrow libertarian appeal. The younger Paul had hope to build on the libertarian grassroots base that had poured tens of millions of dollars into the elder Paul’s campaigns and expand it to more mainstream Republicans
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In the end, he was able to do neither...

Rand Paul struggled to raise serious campaign cash, from both big donors and small ones. He had entered 2016 essentially broke, with $1.27 million in the bank and nearly $250,000 in unpaid bills and some of the remaining money unavailable because it was earmarked to be used only in a general election. Paul had burned through more money than he raised in each of his last two full quarters as a candidate, when others, notably rival Sen. Ted Cruz, were spending far more and still able to pad their political warchests....

While candidates like Trump, Cruz and Marco Rubio — the top three finishers in Iowa — became better liked as the campaign wore on, Paul was the opposite.

By the latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll in Iowa, Paul’s favorability had plummeted underwater, with 41 percent likely caucus-goers having an unfavorable opinion of him and only 40 percent favorable. That represents a remarkable swing from the previous January poll, when his favorability was 65 percent and unfavorability 25 percent. He finished fifth in Iowa — ahead of Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and Chris Christie — but was projected to do much worse in next week’s New Hampshire primary.

Paul suffered a big blow last month when he was relegated to the undercard of the sixth GOP debate. He boycotted the event, saying he was running a “first-tier” campaign. While he made it back on the main stage for last week’s debate, he failed to make much of an impact.

He was also extremely unlikely to qualify for Saturday night’s nationally televised debate in Manchester, N.H., according to criteria announced last week by ABC News. Paul failed to finish in the top three in Iowa and isn’t in the top six in polls conducted among Republicans nationally (he’s tenth) or in New Hampshire (he’s seventh), according to POLITICO’s calculations.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/rand-paul-dropping-out-of-white-house-race-218675#ixzz3z7RLbPuh

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/rand-paul-dropping-out-of-white-house-race-218675#ixzz3z7R88sBv