For Santorum, Cain Less is More

Running for president is tough enough, but having a big campaign staff with big payroll obligations from the start can make things even harder.

 

Just ask former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination after he spent a lot of money in Iowa and fell short of expectations by only placing third in the state straw poll on Saturday.

 

His departure surprised some in the GOP field, but not the fourth- and fifth-place finishers, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, and businessman and radio talk show host Herman Cain.

 

The two told CNN that their much smaller budgets are allowing them to stick around and build momentum. Both finished only a few hundred votes behind Pawlenty and spent almost nothing.

“We’re just going to keep plugging away,” Santorum told CNN. “We were in range of three. I mean I felt like here’s a guy who spent a million bucks in this and we spent a fraction of that and here we are within a few hundred votes of him and I feel very, very good about that. I feel we’re positioned exactly were we want to be.”

 

Likewise, Cain told CNN he was encouraged as well because he spent zero on ads leading up to the poll. Pawlenty, he said, “doubled-down, as we call it, and it didn’t pay off.”