Former governors Mike Huckabee (R) and Martin O’Malley (D) have suspended their campaigns in the 2016 presidential race. Both candidates announced their departure before the final results from the Iowa caucuses had come in.

Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and Fox News personality, announced his departure on his Twitter and his Facebook pages. Both said without any explanation, “I am officially suspending my campaign. Thank you for all your loyal support.”

“He is going to continue to push for the issues he believes,” Huckabee’s spokesman Hogan Gidley said, “but right now this is about thanking his staff and supporters and being with his friends and families and see what doors will open next.” Huckabee is “not even thinking about an endorsement at this time.”

He had less than 2% of the vote in the caucus, and after running in 2008 and waging a vigorous campaign this year, had the support of only 2.2% of Republicans nationally.

As the Associated Press noted, his campaign struggled to gain traction early on, with billionaire Donald Trump, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz dominating the headlines. The few headlines left over were mostly dedicated to the early campaign of insurgent Carly Fiorina and to reporting on the luxuriously funded, underperforming campaign of former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

Eight years before, Huckabee ran strongly among evangelicals and in the South but couldn’t keep pace with Arizona Senator John McCain over the long haul.

An ordained minister who worked for Life Outreach International’s founder and president James Robison early in his career,  Huckabee emphasized the social conservatism learned growing up in the same small Arkansas town Bill Clinton hailed from, Hope, Arkansas. As the Associated Press also reported, Huckabee “stood by his opposition to abortion rights and same-sex marriage, declaring that ‘the Supreme Court is not the supreme being, and they cannot overturn the laws of nature or of nature’s God.'”

O’Malley Exits

Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley garnered even a smaller percentage of the vote on the Democratic side. Wiped out by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, he also decided to drop out of the campaign while the votes were still being counted, the Des Moines Register reported. At the time of writing, with 95% of the districts reporting, he had just 0.5% of the vote. He had gotten just 3% in the newspaper’s final poll. O’Malley had spent more time in Iowa than either of his rivals.

The New York Times reported yesterday that late last year he had taken out a $500,000 loan against anticipated public matching funds, and that most of his staff had not been paid since they were moved to Iowa. “His aides kept news of the loan quiet over the last several weeks,” according to the Times.

Despite having gotten almost no voter support after months of campaigning, O’Malley received over $900,000 in matching funds and $300,000 in donations in January. “He received $1.5 million including the loan, and spent $2.1 million. He has $535,000 in debt and $169,442 in cash on hand.”

“O’Malley racked up a considerably more progressive record than Hillary Clinton’s while remaining a mainstream Democrat who was broadly liked and acceptable to his co-partisans,” Matthew Yglesias of Vox argued. But Clinton moved to the left, taking establishment progressive positions like opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. By taking his positions she was able to crowd him out.

Then, with the entire establishment behind Clinton, Sanders’ pure outsider vision of robust social democracy caught fire with elements of the grassroots. It quickly became a two-candidate race in which O’Malley was playing little substantive role other than waiting in the wings in case one of the other two was hit by a bus.

He was also the victim,Yglesias suggested, of “a larger 21st-century trend in which presidential politics’ historic preference for governors has shifted in favor of senator-centric nomination battles.”