A week after Ron Paul’s first popular vote victory (in the U.S. Virgin Islands), Ron Paul’s quixotic presidential campaign has been abandoned by NBC News. NBC announced today that it was pulling their one and only embedded campaign reporter from Paul.
Paul’s NBC embed, Antony Terrell, has been taken off the campaign bus according to a report by
Politico’s Dylan Byers. Their explanation was that Paul has scaled back his campaign events in recent days and his narrowly targeted delegate-gathering strategy does not require a full-time embedded reporter to cover.
While delegate counts vary widely depending on the news organization or political committee doing the counting, but all counts show Paul in a distant fourth place in the delegate race behind Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.
Paul has set his sights on the states that cause rather than hold a primary, despite Paul’s broad appeal to self-identified moderates and liberals that turnout to vote for him in open primary races. His campaign has opted to mobilize his committed supporters to win caucuses, but thus far this strategy has fallen flat – Paul has failed to win a single caucus state.
NBC is unlikely to regret their decision to pull their only reporter from the Paul campaign as the Republican primary calendar is bereft of any remaining caucuses (with the exceptions of Missouri, Louisiana, Nebraska and Montana’s non-binding caucuses).
In 2008, Ron Paul stayed in the race until June despite having no hope of being a force at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul. This year, he is likely to pursue a similar strategy – don’t hope for a merciful end to this (or Newt Gingrich’s) campaigns any time soon.
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Follow Noah Rothman @Noah_C_Rothman
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