FIRST PERSON

Duncan Hunter On Running For President

As Told To Will Englund

Monday, Sept. 1, 2008


First PersonSometimes presidential candidates don't have to win to accomplish part of their goals. But coming up short--in money, attention, and, of course, votes--still stings.
• Tom Tancredo
• Tommy Thompson
• Duncan Hunter

We had a chance, I thought, a small chance, of winning this thing. I thought we had great issues to appeal to the conservative core of the Republican Party, and so we went out there and gave it everything we had, and we needed to strike a flame in this campaign, and we didn't. We didn't get the traction that we needed. Obviously, we were very short of money, but I have absolutely no complaints.

I won the Arizona straw poll. I won the Texas straw poll. And we weren't able to leverage that into anywhere near the news coverage that we needed. You know, that came a month after the Iowa straw poll, and I learned one thing in Iowa: I took a position early on that I wasn't going to pay the $35 a vote for the delegates to the Iowa straw poll. That's a major mistake because the Iowa delegates expect to have their ways paid to the Iowa straw poll. I got 174 delegates from somebody else's band to come vote for me. But you do have to go to that straw poll with your own delegates. And you gotta pay for them, or they're not going to be there. And so that was a nice statement of principle that ended up resulting in 174 votes at a time when I needed in excess of a thousand votes there.

We tied McCain and Giuliani at the top in the first big straw poll held in South Carolina. But we didn't have enough funds to leverage that showing. It was a good showing, but that meant just a brief glimmer on the major networks, and then it was gone.

You've got to have a structure in place to raise money. In the end, raising money's a lot of hard work, and I simply did not have the contacts. It's very difficult to develop contacts when you're also being a member of Congress, and you got a day job.

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