End of the Trail: Brownback. Photo: Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images

And then there were nine. On Friday, Sam Brownback will drop his bid for the GOP presidential nomination. The Kansas senator, while popular with the conservative base of the party, never seemed to catch fire in the polls. Yet that’s not the reason he’s quitting. A source close to Brownback, who declined to speak on the record because the senator has yet to announce his intentions publicly, says the decision is purely about the money--that is, his lack of it. Brownback raised just $4.2 million during the first nine months of the campaign and blew through most of it, ending the third-quarter with just under $95,000 in the bank. (Interestingly, that’s about how much John McCain has to spend in the primary, when you figure in his campaign’s debts.)

Where did the money go? Well, for one thing, Brownback bet the farm on Iowa. According to his latest campaign reports, he spent at least $300,000 on the Ames Straw Poll--not including the potentially thousands of dollars more the senator spent on “get out the vote” efforts related to the event that were not clearly identified among his expenditures. According to his Federal Election Commission filing, Brownback spent $128,900 on straw poll tickets alone--which, at $35 a pop means he bought more than 3600 tickets. Yet Brownback got just 2,192 votes that day, coming in third, so that means he likely paid for someone to vote for another candidate. Bummer. He spent nearly $20,000 on buses to bring his would-be supporters to Ames.