INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

Bobby Jindal Quits Presidential Race, Heads Home To $490 Million Deficit

By Jayce Wagner
Published on: 02:50 PST, Nov 18, 2015

Tuesday evening, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal officially dropped out of the Republican presidential race, amid rumors of flagging support among voters, which the Inquisitr reported on in September.

Jindal appeared on Fox News to give the announcement, where he says his campaign was just unable to excite voters. Without naming names, Bobby Jindal goes on to blame the electoral climate on the Republican side for his failing campaign, calling it “unpredictable” and “crazy.”

“We spent a lot of time developing detailed policy papers, but given this crazy unpredictable election season, clearly there wasn’t an interest in those policy papers,” Bobby Jindal told Fox News.

This is the second time that Jindal has bowed out of a presidential race. He ran in 2012, but didn’t make it through the brutal Republican primary. Republican pollsters were once optimistic about Bobby Jindal’s political future, in 2008 Newsweek even referred to him as the “Republican Obama,” an unconventional candidate but skilled at drawing in support from both sides of the aisle.

Riding that popularity, Bobby Jindal was chosen to deliver the Republican rebuttal to Obama’s State of the Union address in early 2009. It was a disastrous performance. The GOP had hoped it would endear him to swing voters and tee him up for a presidential run, but the rebuttal was so poorly executed that the New York Daily News called it one of the five worst State of the Union Responses in history.

This time around, Bobby Jindal’s campaign was never able to rise up in the polls, relegating him to the undercard debates and keeping him well out of public view.

During his time as Governor of Louisiana, his politics played further and further to the conservative side, until finally he lost all support with swing voters. Still, his politics were never extreme enough to gather the support of the furthest wings of the Republican party, and his support never rose above 0.3 percent, which Slate reports is within the margin of error for the Republican polls, meaning his support could have been even lower.

His strategists blame press coverage and finances — a lack of both — for the failing campaign. Even so, Tamara Scott, a GOP committeewoman from Iowa, praised Bobby Jindal.

“He had solutions, not just talking points. To me this is very sad that we are losing one that really resonated well with Iowans when they got to hear him,” She told Penn Live.

Even Donald Trump had nice things to say about Jindal, but he wasn’t sad to see him exit the race.

Bobby Jindal is serving out his last term in office as Governor of Louisiana, having reached the state’s term limit, but policy experts aren’t optimistic about his legacy as Governor, which has been defined by his unsuccessful runs at the presidency. Kirby Goidel of Lousiana State University’s Public Policy Research Lab said his time as Governor was all about his ambition, his desire to be President.

“He really did get distracted by the idea, here’s this incredibly gifted young governor who might be president one day, that made him overly focused on Iowa and New Hampshire voters when he could’ve been focusing on solving problems in Louisiana,” Goidel told the Times Picayune.

With his keen political mind elsewhere, the people of Louisiana are left with a $490 million deficit, which Bobby Jindal pledges to close before he leaves office. A tall order for a politician who has had his sights set elsewhere for so long. But legislators and even his opponents in Louisiana are happy to see him leave the campaign trail, in hopes that he might focus on Louisiana’s problems for once, rather than those of potential swing states.

[Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images]

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