Jon Huntsman to drop out, endorse Mitt Romney

By Maggie Haberman, Juana Summers and Jonathan Martin

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. - Jon Huntsman will aim to give Mitt Romney a boost going into the final week before the South Carolina primary, endorsing his one-time rival in the hopes of helping him clinch the nomination.

The former Utah governor's announcement - set for 11 a.m. Monday in a speech at the Convention Center here - comes after several days of discussion within the campaign about the consequences of splitting moderate voters with Romney in Saturday's vote. Resigned to the fact that Huntsman wouldn't win, they believed that their votes would be better used helping Romney hold off his conservative challengers and wrap up the primary race early.

But those conservative challengers greeted the Huntsman news with a shrug.

"Moderates are backing moderates," Rick Santorum said at a diner in Columbia Monday. "That's sort of the bottom line. No surprise there. Gov. Huntsman ran as a moderate, trying to compete for Gov. Romney for the establishment moderate vote. And Gov. Romney had a leg up on him being a solid moderate that the establishment could get behind. Gov. Huntsman wasn't able to crack through that. So I'm not surprised by that all, and I anticipated that actually sooner than today."

Newt Gingrich said he believed Huntsman’s exit helps him.

“It narrows down the field and I think the next five or six days are going to tell the tale,” Gingrich told POLITICO Monday morning. “If the conservatives consolidate, it’s clear that I’ll beat Romney.”

Gingrich warned against conservatives splitting the vote.

“The next five days are going to be wild. Really, the test here is really simple: if the conservatives consolidate, Romney loses decisively. If they don’t consolidate, it’s going to be very close,” Gingrich said.

Huntsman's decision to drop out 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.

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.

"We were expecting to be between 8 to 13 percent in the polls here," said the official.

It's a tough ending for Huntsman - his campaign has been low on funds, and faced grim prospects in Saturday's South Carolina primary. Huntsman himself has expressed reluctance to loan his campaign more than the $2 million he initially seeded it with.

His father had been the chief funder of a super PAC backing his son, but the wealthy Huntsman Corp. executive has, according to sources, grown leery of throwing money into the effort.

Sources said the endorsement announcement will be followed a few hours later by a scheduled 2 p.m. meeting for all of Huntsman's staff.

Pulling the plug now allows Huntsman to preserve the positives of his third place showing, a result that did reflect momentum that lifted him from single digits in polls less than two weeks earlier. There has been speculation he might run as a third-party candidate, but he has insisted that is not the case - and endorsing Romney would seem to make that impossible.

Even as he held some 170 events in the Granite State, Huntsman never seemed to catch on. This was in part because he was uncertain how to define himself. Even on the Friday before the New Hampshire primary, he didn't answer directly when asked if he was the consistent conservative in the race or a pragmatic moderate. 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.

But Huntsman's failure can also be traced to his campaign style. In debates and on the stump, he came across as the sober diplomat he is, lacking the charisma and fire Republican primary voters are hungry for this year.

He ultimately did contrast more specifically with his rivals, and became more critical of Obama, who had appointed him as U.S. Ambassador to China - a post he stepped down from earlier this year. Huntsman had a record as former Utah governor that could appeal to conservatives, but it was not one that he emphasized early on.

Instead, his appeal tended to run to the center as he de-emphasized partisanship - a move that could help him in a general, but which proved a tough sell in a primary dominated by the hard-right of the GOP.

But he did gain a little traction in the last hours before the New Hampshire primary, including at the NBC/Facebook Debate in New Hampshire last Sunday, when Huntsman charged Romney was pushing division for criticizing his time as an ambassador in the Obama administration. Huntsman, in his most memorable debate performance ever, shot back saying that he was serving his country while Romney was raising money for GOP candidates.

"I will always put my country first," Huntsman said on the debate stage, using a phrase that would become a rallying cry for his campaign's final days.

Huntsman kept up the attacks on Romney - outside a polling place in Manchester, N.H., last Tuesday, he suggested that Romney's statement that he "like[s] being able to fire people" made the former Massachusetts governor "pretty much unelectable."

Though Huntsman entered the race to great media attention, his poll numbers never climbed out of the single digits nationally, as Republicans remained suspicious of his two years serving as ambassador to China - whom he was on record praising - and for his more moderate views.

Huntsman made two tactical decisions that kept him out of much of the conversation: He opted to skip competing in the Iowa caucuses, citing his opposition to ethanol subsidies he said would be too problematic in the state, and he for months pursued an above-the-fray candidate in the GOP field, that focused on his executive experience and competence rather than his rivals.

More recently, his campaign focused on a "trust" theme, arguing that Americans no longer trust elected leaders and their institutions of power due to a corrupting Washington culture. Huntsman put himself forward as the candidate that could bring civility to public discourse about politics.

But undercutting his rationale and limiting his chances are low bank balances and peril within the campaign. During the summer, a number of staffers left the campaign as a result of infighting. In September - facing low polling numbers - Huntsman moved his campaign headquarters from New Hampshire to Florida, retrenching from a strategy which originally was to focus on those two states and South Carolina, where he'll be when he ends his campaign.

Huntsman follows Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann out of the race. His exit whittles the field down to four besides Romney - Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. They will meet for a debate Monday night in Myrtle Beach.

James Hohmann contributed reporting from Columbia, S.C.