The day Ben Carson's campaign died
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Ben Carson formally pulled the plug on his White House bid on Friday, but the retired neurosurgeon's campaign died long before.
The date was November 17. In a bombshell New York Times report, a man whom longtime Carson adviser Armstrong Williams described as a "mentor" to Carson said the Republican candidate couldn't be taught "one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East."
The man, Duane Clarridge, a former CIA agent, reportedly said Carson needed weekly conference calls on foreign policy so "we can make him smart."
Clarridge, described by The Times as a top Carson campaign adviser on terrorism and national security, said a claim Carson made in a November GOP debate was based on faulty information. Carson had said of Syria: "The Chinese are there."
The story was devastating to Carson's candidacy, as it was published at the same time voters were pivoting to foreign-policy issues, just four days after the terrorist attacks in Paris.
Just 10 days before, Carson had done something no other candidate had before, according to RealClearPolitics' polling average: overtake Donald Trump in national polls after last summer, when the Republican frontrunner had surged to the top.
Carson overtook Trump for the first time on November 4, but Carson soon dipped back down behind the frontrunner. Through November 13, the day of the Paris terrorist attacks, he was within half a point of Trump for first.
"I mean on November 13, we were on pace to raise $40 million for the quarter," ex-Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett, now a volunteer adviser for Trump's campaign, told Business Insider in an earlier interview. "Then the campaign it just hit that ice patch. And so, instead of raising another $20 million for the second half of the quarter, they raised $3 [million.]"
Bennett said the campaign knew it was the beginning of the end after the Times article dropped.
"They all thought that there were different ways out," Bennett said. "They were going to eschew a bunch of policy papers and change the trajectory of the campaign ... And then Armstrong Williams started inserting himself more and more."
He continued: "The Paris attack, coupled with the Armstrong Williams story about how Ben doesn't understand foreign affairs, really just brought fund-raising to a complete standstill."
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
The campaign, as well as Williams — who was not officially a part of the campaign but who frequently appeared as a Carson surrogate in news interviews — tried to walk back Clarridge's statements and the broader view that Carson was a national-security novice.
But it was too late. The terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, in early December further cemented foreign policy as a major theme of the Republican primaries.
Carson's poll numbers were in a free fall. Within a week, he had dropped 4 points. By mid-December, he had lost half of his support.
At the same time, Trump's support swelled to record highs. By Christmas, the mogul reached an all-time high in the average of polls. On New Year's Eve, with Carson's support dipping below 10%, Bennett and the campaign's communications director, Doug Watts, abruptly resigned, with Williams' influence cited as a large reason for the upheaval.
The changes didn't end up helping Carson, a highly regarded neurosurgeon who first burst onto the political scene in 2013 after unleashing a scathing critique of President Barack Obama while the president was seated next to him at the National Prayer Breakfast.
Carson's polling numbers continued to plummet, falling to just under 8% by the February 1 Iowa caucuses, where he finished fourth. As more rival candidates began to drop out of the race, Carson was unable to pick up any of their voters.
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Though the January Federal Election Commission report showed that Carson had nearly as much cash on hand as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Carson continued to finish near the bottom in state primaries and caucuses, with this past week's Super Tuesday being one final disaster. Carson did not finish better than fourth in at least 11 of the 12 states that voted on that day (Colorado does not release the results of its Republican caucus).
With just eight total delegates, and after both Williams and Carson's campaign chair, Bob Dees, said they saw no path to victory, Carson finally decided to suspend his campaign.
"Even though I might be leaving the campaign trail — you know there's a lot of people who love me, they just won't vote for me," he said Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. "I will still be heavily involved in trying to save our nation," he added.
Soon after making the announcement and telling the crowd he would be taking a job with My Faith Votes, a nonpartisan group focused on getting US Christian voters to turn out, Carson talked about a regret that most likely led to the bombshell Times story.
"I regret not choosing my own people early on," he told WABC. "Letting other people do that and trusting them. That was clearly a mistake."