Two days after leaving the Republican presidential-nomination race, Rick Santorum said on Thursday that the main reason he dropped out was that the campaign simply ran out of money.
“We were just burning through cash at a rate we couldn't maintain,” the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania said on Tony Perkins’s Today's Issues radio show, noting that the campaign for the first time started to go into debt. “Super PAC money didn't pay the bills on the campaign.”
Santorum suspended his campaign one day after his 3-year-old daughter, Bella, who suffers from a rare chromosomal disorder, was released from the hospital. On Thursday, he did not mention his daughter or her health issues as a factor in his decision.
Santorum said the decision to suspend his campaign came after the primary loss in Wisconsin, which he and his team felt they had to win.
“In the week after Wisconsin, we basically raised no money,” he said, noting that the campaign had sent out requests for donations. “People were e-mailing back saying the race was over.”
In Pennsylvania, Santorum said, he would have had no money to spend on advertising against front-runner Mitt Romney’s millions.
“We were probably looking at not being able to spend a penny on advertising,” he said. “You want to compete, but we felt we couldn’t.”
The campaign also looked ahead to what was deemed as a favorable calendar for Romney. “It seemed unlikely — reaching the point of impossible — to stop Romney,” he said. “We thought, ‘Maybe it’s time to stand down.’”
That said, Santorum said he did credit his rival with shaping the media narrative.
“I give Romney a lot of credit in that he was able to more effectively spin the media,” he said.
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