(Jae C. Hong/AP)

I was sad to see Santorum step out of the race.

Rick Santorum ends presidential campaign after conceding to Mitt Romney in phone call

By Chris Moody

Political Reporter

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By Chris Moody | The Ticket – 1 hr 47 mins ago

After calling Mitt Romney to say he is ending his presidential campaign, Rick Santorum announced the end of his presidential campaign Tuesday during a press conference in Pennsylvania, his home state.

“We will suspend our campaign effective today,” Santorum said surrounded by members of his family in Gettysburg.

Santorum spent the weekend off the campaign trail with his three-year-old daughter, Bella, who suffers from a rare genetic disorder, after she was rushed to the hospital Friday.

“We made a decision over the weekend that, while this presidential race for us is over, for me, and we will suspend our campaign effective today, we are not done fighting,” he said.

Few thought Santorum would make it this far.

The former Pennsylvania senator spent most of 2011 on a grueling and often lonely campaign tour through Iowa. His strenuous underdog campaign was organized by a skeleton staff and run the old fashioned way: By methodically speaking with voters face-to-face, town by town. Candidates like Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain rose and fell throughout 2011, while Santorum spent the year mostly relegated to the far end of the debate stage. He was a long-dormant volcano due for a surprise eruption.

In the final days before the first Republican caucuses in Iowa–a contest on which Santorum rested his entire strategy–it appeared that his campaign would be laid to rest in the state where it was born. Iowa Republicans did not turn their eyes to the man who had spent more time in their state than any other candidate until the very end, but they ultimately awarded him with a surprise, hair’s-breadth victory–not formally confirmed until weeks after the vote–that helped keep his fledgling campaign afloat into the spring.

The first public whispers of his impending rise came with a CNN poll released three days after Christmas that showed Santorum in third place among likely Iowa caucus-goers, higher than he had ever been before in a public opinion survey. When CNN first announced the poll, Santorum was greeting a small group of supporters at a furniture store in Dubuque. As he weaved between La-Z-Boy recliners and leather couches, a reporter showed Santorum the poll results on her Blackberry. Santorum paused and read the results. While composed, his face revealed an expression of shock mixed with relief.

“I feel very, very good about how things are going and it’s nice to see that reflected in some of the polls,” Santorum said after surveying the good news on the reporter’s phone. “But we have a lot of work to do. A lot of work.”

Before the good polls began to pour in, it was not entirely uncommon for Santorum to hold town halls in which only a handful of supporters bothered to show up. The heart of Santorum’s Iowa support rested in the deep red northwest corner of the state, a solid four-hour drive from Des Moines, where many reporters made their home base. At the time, driving all the way to the South Dakota border to see the candidate, even when no other candidates were in the state, didn’t seem worth the effort.”I’d usually make the drive to see a candidate,” one reporter, comfortably nursing a beer at a Des Moines hotel bar, said in early December. “But it’s Santorum.”

By New Year’s Eve, when a Des Moines Register poll showed Santorum gaining swift momentum, the grim outlook among reporters covering his campaign would change. In the final days before the caucuses, if you arrived on time for an event, you’d be stuck outside in the cold. Every pizza place, coffee shop and diner Santorum visited was jam packed with supporters, media and curiosity seekers, sometimes hours before his arrival.

For the first time in the entire cycle, Romney turned his gaze to Santorum, about whom the Romney campaign didn’t even bother to collect early opposition research, according to a report published much later by Politico. Romney criticized Santorum on the stump during a New Year’s Day rally for spending 16 years in Washington in the House and Senate, one of the first times Romney took time out of his stump speech to discuss Santorum.

“I think it shows that we’re on the move,” Santorum said in response. “And we’re resonating with the people of this state.”

He was right. While an initial count of Iowa votes showed Romney winning by a mere eight votes, the final results–released several weeks later during the South Carolina primaries, a scenario that robbed Santorum of the boost in news coverage that traditionally comes from winning the Iowa caucuses–put Santorum over the top by 34 votes.

“This is a solid win,” Santorum said during a stop in South Carolina two weeks after the Iowa caucuses. “It’s a much stronger win than the win Governor Romney claimed to have.”

Over the next few contests, Santorum took a backseat role to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who defeated Romney in South Carolina before Romney scored a win in Florida. Dogged by an aggressive series of attack ads run by the Romney campaign in Florida, Gingrich’s momentum slowed after South Carolina, leaving the door open for Santorum to take his position as the alternative candidate to the former Massachusetts governor. Against most predictions, Santorum swept a three-state contest on Feb. 7, winning caucuses in Colorado, Minnesota and a non-binding primary in Missouri.

Santorum was back on the map, and would remain Romney’s greatest challenger for the remainder of the race.

Over the next two months, Santorum would go on to win only a handful of states, as Romney increased his delegate lead. By the time Romney won a majority of votes in the Wisconsin primary on April 3rd, most observers within the party and in the media declared an end to the Republican primary cycle. Romney would take it, they predicted. But with his home state looming just three weeks away, Santorum vowed to press on.

“If this thing was all about D.C. pressure for us to get out, we’d have never even set foot in Iowa,” Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley told reporters the night Romney swept contests in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia. “This thing’s been going on for a long time. We’re not worried at all about the pressure we’re going to get from the outside D.C. world, we’ve had it from the get-go.”

While Santorum voiced confidence that he would win Pennsylvania, where he lost his Senate seat in 2006 to Bob Casey by the record margin of 18 percentage points, state polls leading up to the primary date showed momentum to be on Romney’s side.

“I walked out after the Iowa caucus victory and said ‘game on,'” Santorum said in Gettysburg. “I know a lot of folks are going to write–maybe even those at the White House –‘game over.’ But this game is a long, long, long way from over. We are going to continue to go out there and fight to make sure that we defeat President Barack Obama.”

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Once a month we go to Memphis on for a Sunday lunch with my sisters and my parents and all the other relatives (brother-in-laws and 10 cousins, nephews, etc). Sometimes we will attend church at my parents church, Bellevue Baptist. We decided against going this week since we have a guest coming with our family to our church Fellowship Bible Church.

Guess who was at Bellevue this week? Take a look:

Santorum visits Memphis to shore up support; polls show state now a toss up

• By Scott Carroll, Zack McMillin
• Memphis Commercial Appeal
• Posted March 4, 2012 at 10:19 a.m., updated March 4, 2012 at 10:57 p.m.

Great night for Santorum supporters like me.

Santorum projected to win Minnesota, Missouri GOP Contests

Published February 07, 2012

| FoxNews.com

Rick Santorum is projected to win the Minnesota Republican presidential caucuses, after earlier winning the non-binding Missouri primary.

Santorum is also ahead in early returns out of Colorado. The former Pennsylvania senator could be looking at the best night of his campaign since Iowa, in which he was belatedly declared the winner. For the first time in weeks, he — and not Newt Gingrich — was posing the biggest challenge to frontrunner Mitt Romney.

With 37 percent of precincts reporting in Minnesota, Santorum was ahead with 46 percent. Ron Paul was pulling in second with 26 percent, followed by Romney and Gingrich.

Santorum was also leading in Colorado, followed by Gingrich in second, and Romney and Paul at the back. A total of 70 delegates are up for grabs in those two states Tuesday, though the caucuses are just the start of a lengthy delegate-allocating process.

In Missouri, the primary is effectively a statewide straw poll, as it sets the stage for the delegate-awarding caucuses a month from now. Still, Santorum cruised to a crushing victory. With 85 percent of precincts reporting, Santorum was leading with 55 percent of the vote. Romney had 25 percent, followed by Ron Paul with 12 percent. Gingrich was not on the ballot in that contest.

The returns appear to challenge assertions by Gingrich that the GOP presidential contest is a two-person race between him and Romney. Gingrich, though, hardly competed in the three states Tuesday, instead focusing his attention on other contests down the primary calendar. He campaigned Tuesday in Ohio, which holds its election on March 6, “Super Tuesday,” as the other candidates made last-minute appeals in Colorado and Minnesota.

Santorum, speaking in Colorado, urged caucus-goers earlier to do something Tuesday night that “no one was expecting.”

“Provide a little surprise to the inevitable march of Governor Romney,” Santorum said.

Tuesday’s contests were the first of the season in which multiple states were holding contests on one day. Up next, Maine concludes its caucuses this Saturday, and primaries will be held in Michigan and Arizona later in the month.

Romney so far has won three contests, in New Hampshire, Florida and Nevada. Gingrich has won one, in South Carolina.

Romney entered Tuesday’s competition with a healthy lead in the delegate count — at 101 delegates.

Gingrich trailed with 32 delegates, following by Santorum with 17 and Paul with nine. It takes 1,144 delegates to win the nomination.

Though Missouri’s primary Tuesday was largely symbolic, the contest was still expected to cost state taxpayers about $6 million.