He didn’t drop out. And he only lost by less than 10,000 votes. And what really killed him was 3 weeks of whether he ever said the n-word, and an unprovable story about a deer head stuffed in a mailbox.
But it all started because he couldn’t explain why he called the guy “macaca”, and because his campaign started with a dismissive response that made no sense. That opened the gate for the media to pretend there was something that had to be looked at — was Allen racist.
Although I still maintain that in the end, the reason Allen lost (remember, it was less than 10,000 votes) was because his campaign attacked Webb for some perverted imagery in a book Webb wrote — a book that military folks highly regarded, and therefore perceived the attack as an attack on their own morality.
It was a great attack for 3rd-party people to make to swing the women vote, but when the campaign adopted it officially, it turned off military people. As did Allen’s campaign trying to attack Webb as being sexist when he was a military man in the 70s and 80s.
Still, he only lost by a few thousand votes.