January 30, 2018 01:31 PM UTC

BREAKING: Tom Tancredo Out of Governor's Race

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Ernest Luning has more for the publication formerly known as the Colorado Statesman:

Former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo is ending his bid for the Republican nomination for Colorado governor on Tuesday because he hasn’t raised the money he believes would be necessary to win an expensive election against a wealthy Democrat willing to spend millions on his campaign, Colorado Politics has learned.

“I do not want to win a primary and lose a general, and I fear that was where we were going,” he told Colorado Politics in an interview. [Pols emphasis]

“Even though I’m the front-runner — you make it through a primary, and then all hell breaks loose, you have millions upon millions of dollars spent attacking you, and you can’t respond, you don’t have the resources to respond. It appeared to me the goal — winning the general, that was the main goal — and it does not appear to me to be feasible.”

One of nine announced GOP candidates for governor, Tancredo has led the pack by wide margins in every publicly available poll. He’s run for governor twice before — in 2010 as a third-party candidate, when he lost to Democrat John Hickenlooper but received more than three times as many votes as the Republican nominee, and in 2014, when he came in second in a four-way Republican primary.

Tancredo’s rationale for ending his campaign is…strange. The former Congressman got into the Governor’s race last fall because he thought he was the only Republican candidate who could win in a General Election. Tancredo had been under a lot of pressure from fellow Republicans to exit the race, but that’s nothing new for him, either.

Tancredo was not doing particularly well on the fundraising front, but as the GOP frontrunner heading into the state assembly, he didn’t really need a lot of money to make sure his name got onto the ballot.

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We’ll certainly have more to say about this developing story:

#BREAKING: Confirmed – @TancForGovernor is dropping out of #Governors race.@CBSDenver

— Shaun Boyd (@CBS4Shaun) January 30, 2018