Ben Carson, the only Republican to have once threatened the lead of Donald Trump in national polls, said on Wednesday he saw no path forward and would skip a debate on Thursday in his hometown of Detroit, signalling an end to his candidacy after paltry performances in the nominating contests.
Stopping short of suspending his campaign, Mr Carson said he would provide more details in a speech on Friday, but after his dismal showing in the Super Tuesday states, his campaign is effectively over.
A retired paediatric brain surgeon of world renown, Mr Carson long held Republicans’ favour with an uplifting biography and a quiet manner that belied his strafing critiques of President Barack Obama and liberalism, which delighted grass-roots conservatives.
But he withered under mocking insults from Donald Trump, especially in Iowa. And he suffered from voters’ desire for a candidate projecting strength at a time of anxiety over terrorism.
“Dr Carson’s favourability ratings have never changed,” said Armstrong Williams, a close adviser, just before the Iowa caucuses last month, when Carson finished a disappointing fourth. “But after Paris and San Bernardino, his supporters made a different decision. They wanted a war president. Dr Carson did not have the rhetoric or the competitiveness on the debate stage to say the explosive things, to say, ‘let’s keep all the Muslims out.” ’
Poverty
Even in a year of fierce anti-establishment leanings, Mr Carson’s months-long popularity, coupled with the prodigious support of small donors – his $20 million collected in the summer led all other candidates – stunned political professionals. Born into poverty and raised by a single mother with a third-grade education, he remade himself from a wayward teenager into a scholar, winning admission to Yale and medical school.
By age 33 he was the chief of a major department at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Mr Carson burst on the political scene in 2013 when he criticised Mr Obama’s health care plan at the National Prayer Breakfast, a video watched over and over by delighted conservatives.
After his disappointing showing in the Iowa caucuses, Mr Carson never seemed to regain his political footing. In the round of Super Tuesday contests, his hopes for a strong performance in the south faltered, as he ran a distant fourth or fifth in every state.
“I do not see a political path forward in light of last evening’s Super Tuesday primary results,” he said. “However, this grassroots movement on behalf of ‘We the People’ will continue. I appreciate the support, financial and otherwise, from all corners of America,” he said. “Gratefully, my campaign decisions are not constrained by finances; rather by what is in the best interests of the American people.”