News began breaking on Sunday morning before most folks had finished their coffee or had even woken up on the left coast. Some fourteen hours after finishing a relatively distant third place to Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul in the Ames straw poll, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is ending his quest for the presidency.
Pawlenty told supporters on a conference call Sunday morning that he would announce on ABC’s “This Week” that he was ending his campaign after a disappointing finish in the Iowa straw poll on Saturday.
The poll was a test of organizational strength and popularity in the state whose caucuses lead off the GOP nomination fight.
Pawlenty had struggled to gain traction in Iowa, a state he had said he must win, after laying the groundwork for a campaign for nearly two years.
I won’t attempt to hide my disappointment since, as most of you know, I was quite a fan of T-Paw and had hoped he would do well. But in the end, there have likely been too many doses of reality being delivered to his campaign. As Ed and Tina already pointed out, while some people brush off the importance of a straw poll like the one in Ames, this was more than just a test of how many free tickets and pulled pork sandwiches one can hand out. It’s also a test of how well you can build your organizational structure and what kind of image you can project.
T-Paw had poured almost all of his remaining campaign funds into this effort and worked the ground game for well over a year, yet he still came up far, far short.
