Wisconsin Gov. Walker ends presidential campaign, urges other candidates to follow

Even his anti-union creds did him no good.

During the second Republican primary debate last week, Walker spoke for only 8.5 minutes, landing him dead last in the field of 11 candidates on stage. And they’re getting a lot of attention. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., speaks during the CNN Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum on Wednesday, September 16, 2015, in Simi Valley, Calif. Hurst had been eyeing the Florida senator for a while and was one of Monday’s earliest poaches.

What are they going to do with all those snow-white unicorns now grazing in the fields outside Mukwonago?

Ted Cruz, the Republican presidential candidate, said Saturday he hopes the president’s choice of secretary of the army is based on what is best for the nation.

“Politics has a musical chairs component to it”, he said. “If the demise of Mr. Walker’s campaign emphasises anything”, Patrick Healy and Alexander Burns of the New York Times note, “it is the intense pressure that candidates are under to raise enormous sums of money”.

Walker’s right. Establishment Republicans need to choose a champion and get behind that person if they want a shot at taking down Trump.

“He didn’t click on television”. “I’m flat-out saying it. Candidates can say that”.

Thank God for small blessings: At least Scott Walker didn’t credit God with his decision to drop out of this race, as he did with his fledgling 2006 campaign against Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle. “In view of this, I will suspend my crusade instantly”, he said. “For so many months, it’s been all about Scott Walker“.

Mr. Walker’s pointed rebuke of Mr. Trump gave powerful voice to the private fears of many Republicans that the party risked alienating wide swaths of the American electorate – Hispanics, women, immigrants, veterans, and most recently Muslims – if Mr. Trump continued vilifying or mocking those groups as part of his overtures to angry and disaffected voters. While stepping aside, he urged others to quit, too – suggesting that a smaller pool of candidates would be better positioned to take down Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

Phil Musser, an unaligned Republican strategist, said he expected donors to nevertheless sit patient for a while. “Donors will take their time before falling in love again”. He’d already managed to attract at least one to his event Monday evening – Iowa State Rep. Terry Baxter, who had committed to Walker, was in the audience at Bush’s campaign event. “I have great admiration and respect for my friend Scott Walker“, Cliff Hurst, the Granite State’s former GOP vice chairman said. James Davis, a spokesman for the Koch-affiliated Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, praised Walker on Monday, but made it clear that the network has yet to settle on a Republican contender and may not do so. Or maybe it was a lack of charisma – yet his big surge earlier this year came not from a Jeb Bush-like fundraising haul, but after an extremely well-received speech.

“It has been communicated to me that he is getting out of the race”, said Iowa state Sen.