Republican hopeful Huntsman quits race, endorses Romney

Jan 16, 2012, 20:37 GMT

Washington - Former governor and ambassador Jon Huntsman said Monday that he was pulling out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

He endorsed Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts who is the frontrunner after winning the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, which opened the 2012 election season.

'This race has degenerated into an onslaught of negative and personal attacks not worthy of the American people and not worthy of this critical time in American history,' Huntsman told a press conference in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Huntsman, 51, a former governor of the western mountain state of Utah from 2005-09, was ambassador to Singapore in 1992 under the elder president George Bush and was named ambassador to China in 2009 by Democratic President Barack Obama. Huntsman left the post in April 2011 to seek the conservative party's nomination to challenge Obama in the November 2012 general elections.

Running as a moderate alternative to the more conservative field of Republican candidates, he made little effort in the Iowa caucuses, where he received only 1-per-cent support, choosing instead to spend months campaigning in New Hampshire, where he finished third last week with 17 per cent of the vote.

The next primaries in South Carolina on Saturday and Florida on January 31 are widely viewed as the last chance for one of the more conservative Republican candidates - former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, former House speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia or Texas Governor Rick Perry - to slow Romney's momentum.

Texas Congressman Ron Paul, running on a libertarian platform that is strongly free market and anti-war, is expected to remain in the race through the spring.