Santorum and Gingrich were pretty minor shoestring campaigns at that point, so it’s not really surprising they didn’t make the ballot. Perry is kind of unfathomable though. I wonder if the GOP insiders didn’t try to keep a lot of competent people from joining the other campaigns through threats in order to help Romney. I’m sure they pulled every string behind-the-scenes that they could for Romney.
I know McDonnell ended up endorsing Romney, but not until Perry dropped out. I still believe that if Perry had submitted enough signatures to get on the ballot, McDonnell might have endorsed him then.
I don’t understand Perry. He was here in September at the RPV luncheon, and they didn’t collect signatures. He had Jim Gilmore as his campaign chief — the former Governor and prior Presidential candidate, who certainly understood the process and knew how to make it happen.
We had a general statewide election, they just had to put people at the republican-strong polling places and ask for signatures. You’d know their districts, you’d know they were registered voters. We had hundreds of thousands of republicans vote that day. And yet at my precinct, the only form was Herman Cain’s.
I assumed Perry had it taken care of, because they wouldn’t return my e-mails, and they didn’t seem to be doing anything. I think that was my biggest dissappointment with the Perry group, when they failed to make our ballot.