Seven GOP candidates who could drop from '16 race before Iowa

[Geee]

The Hill :

Seventeen major Republican candidates are running hard for the White House. But not all will make it to Iowa.

 

Of the crowded 2016 GOP primary field, who will be the first to head for the exits?

It’s impossible to know for sure at this early stage, but a handful of high-profile campaigns are already showing serious signs of strain six months out from Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses on Feb. 1.

 

Super PACs have changed the game, enabling struggling candidates tochoose to stay in the race as long as they’re propped up by deep-pocketed donors. But as Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich proved in 2012, having a wealthy mega-donor in your corner can’t buy you the nomination.

 

Here’s The Hill’s look at GOP presidential campaigns that could be over before the Iowa caucuses even get going:

 

Rick Perry

 

The former Texas governor generated big headlines this week but for all the wrong reasons. Running out of cash, Perry stopped paying all of his campaign staffers at his campaign headquarters in Austin, as well as his teams on the ground in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

 

Perry raised a little more than $1 million in the second quarter of 2015, and had about $884,000 cash on hand. He’s now paring back his campaign to a bare-bones operation in order to save it.

 

Those steps are a page right out of John McCain’s presidential playbook. The Arizona senator, his campaign coffers nearly dry in the summer of 2007, was forced to lay off top staffers, fly coach on commercial planes, even carry his own bags through airports. He managed to stay in the race, and ended up winning the GOP nomination.

 

[Valin]

Rick Santorum, Jim Gilmore, George Pataki...Don't know why they are even in the race, I could say the same about The Huckester. I like Rick, but No.

 

"Lindsey Graham

 

The senior senator from South Carolina knows he’s not going to win the GOP nomination, but that’s not the point.

Graham, a retired Air Force colonel and defense hawk, is in the race to ensure that national security issues — including the war against Islamic State militants — remain front and center in the 2016 campaign."

 

And that is why he will stay in as long as he can, which will probably be next March.

 

As for the rest...ask me in November.