Washington – U.S. Republican Rand Paul suspended his 2016 presidential bid on Wednesday after his small-government campaign failed to gain traction with voters.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
The U.S. senator from Kentucky was the second Republican candidate, behind former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, to drop out of the race since Monday’s night’s Iowa caucuses. That contest launched the parties’ process to nominate candidates for the November election.
“It’s been an incredible honor to run a principled campaign for the White House. Today, I will end where I began, ready and willing to fight for the cause of Liberty,” Paul said in a statement.
In the Republican race, the libertarian-leaning Paul finished in fifth place in Iowa with 4.5 percent of the vote. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz finished first in Iowa, putting a dent in real estate tycoon Donald Trump’s standing as front-runner to be his party’s nominee.
Paul, who is also focused on winning another U.S. Senate term, said he would continue fighting for limited government, criminal justice reform and “reasonable” foreign policy.
The heir apparent to the libertarian-minded voters who helped his father gain a standing in the last two presidential elections, Paul struggled to attract support in a crowded Republican field.
His withdrawal leaves 10 Republican candidates in the 2016 White House race.
he is the only TRUE Republican in the race, very sad.
He’s nothing more than a political chameleon, glad he’s gone, anti-Israel like his pop.
Rand was actually the Republican who had the best positions – he was correct about 30% of the time and crazy the other 70%. The other candidates are somewhere far off the crazy and incompetent scale. Republican former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, recently said that the Republican candidates have a grasp of national security issues that “would embarrass a middle schooler” and, ” if you don’t have any experience in how government works, if you have never been in government, your ability to make the government work is going to be significantly reduced.” A fellow of the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute opined, in The Military Times, that “none of the GOP candidates’ security plans unveiled so far are actually good for national security, in part because most of them have not seriously engaged on the major questions of the use of U.S. military power overseas and and the money needed to sustain that force.” But who on the Republican side these days cares about expert opinions and facts?