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Fox News Undercard Republican Debate: Live Coverage
Rick Santorum is raging against the machine right now. He’s pretty salty about being in this undercard debate, as he’s just told us in his opening statement, when the moderators asked him if he’s going to drop out after Iowa — I would say he definitely will if he loses. Iowa has turned into his Waterloo; he technically won the state in 2012, but that win was only declared 16 days after the Iowa GOP wrongly declared Mitt Romney the winner. Romney got the media bump and Santorum got bitter.
Santorum is right that the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll omitted him. So did two others since the start of the year, of 24 compiled by HuffPost Pollster. All 24 polls asked about Huckabee and Fiorina, but just 14 asked about Gilmore.
Q: Who else should we expect to drop after the first two contests? Fiorina? Carson? — commenter Dana Renee
A: For what it’s worth, our forecast model calculates a dropout probability for each candidate. If this year is like the past, we probably won’t see very many dropouts before New Hampshire, but they’ll pick up significantly after that. Here are the chances it assigns each candidate of dropping out by the time of the Feb. 20 South Carolina primary.
| CANDIDATE | DROPOUT |
|---|---|
| Santorum | 62.6% |
| Christie | 57.1% |
| Paul | 56.8% |
| Fiorina | 56.8% |
| Huckabee | 52.7% |
| Carson | 45.0% |
| Kasich | 41.1% |
| Bush | 29.5% |
| Rubio | 23.4% |
| Cruz | 22.5% |
| Trump | 5.9% |