Rick Santorum concedes to Mitt Romney in phone call, meets the press

By Chris Moody | The Ticket

Rick Santorum called Mitt Romney Tuesday to say he is ending his presidential campaign, Yahoo News has learned.

Santorum is scheduled to make an announcement at a press conference in Gettysburg, Pa., at 2 p.m. ET.

Calls to several campaign aides from Yahoo News were not returned before the event.

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'sSantorum."

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.

Read the rest here: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/rick-santorum-calls-mitt-r...