Santorum officially ends campaign, endorses Rubio

UPDATE: In an appearance on Greta Van Susteren’s Fox News program, Rick Santorum officially announced he was suspending his campaign for the Republican nomination for president and throwing his support to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

The former senator from Pennsylvania told Susteren that he and his campaign wanted to find a candidate who “really espoused the values we believed in.” Santorum added that Rubio “is a born leader and someone I just feel a lot of confidence in.”

OUR EARLIER REPORT (3:50 p.m.): Former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., is dropping out of the presidential race, CNN reported this afternoon. Santorum had already called off a tour of South Carolina scheduled for this week when sources told CNN he planned to suspend his campaign altogether and endorse another candidate this evening.

Santorum got just .95 percent of the Republican vote in Monday night’s Iowa caucuses, which he won in 2012. That year, he went on to win primaries in 10 more states and was runner-up to Mitt Romney at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

But part of his 2012 success came from the weak field of Republican candidates. The conservative base of the party wanted an alternative to Romney, and Santorum had fewer negatives than the only other viable candidate, former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Among the star-studded slate of GOP presidential hopefuls this year, Santorum had a hard time getting traction.

Santorum is known for his social conservative values and his outreach to the working class. During the 2012 campaign, he won the overwhelming majority of support from evangelical and pro-life voters. His pro-life stance is personal: In 2008, doctors recommended he and his wife abort their seventh child after a sonogram revealed the baby had a rare genetic disorder that often proves fatal. But the Santorums, devout Catholics, rejected the idea, and Karen Santorum gave birth in 2008 to Isabella, who is now 7 years old.

Santorum wrote a book called Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works, in which he took his own party to task, making the case that Republicans aren’t doing enough to connect with blue-collar voters.

“We’re out there talking as if everybody who’s a voter is like us—high-energy, type-A people who want to reach for the brass ring,” Santorum said in a speech at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference. “Well, you know what, we need folks like that, and we need to have policies that encourage people to do that. But … we also need folks who are going to work 9-to-5 and go home and coach Little League.”