By Marie Horrigan, CQ Staff

California Rep. Duncan Hunter dropped his longshot bid for the Republican presidential nomination Saturday night after drawing minimal support in the contests so far — including Nevada’s GOP caucuses, in which he took just 2 percent of the vote.

“I ran the campaign exactly the way I wanted to, and at this point not being able to gain traction in conservative states of Nevada and South Carolina, it’s time to allow our volunteers and supporters to focus on the campaigns that remain viable,” he said at a news conference in San Diego.

Hunter withdrew from the race as returns from the South Carolina Republican primary indicated he won 0 percent of the vote. He officially announced his presidential bid just one year ago in the city of Spartanburg and has since announced he will not seek a 14th House term, endorsing his son, also Duncan Hunter , to succeed him.

Hunter’s hopes for seriously competing in the Republican nominating contest were staked largely on getting a jump start from a strong showing in the early primary in South Carolina, where he hoped his advocacy of a strong military and conservative views on immigration and social issues would appeal to the strongly conservative Republican electorate.

But Hunter, though he represented a San Diego-based congressional district since 1981 and is a recent former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, entered the race with an extremely low national profile that did not greatly improve despite his participation in numerous candidate debates and forums. His campaign suffered a blow in recent weeks when some debate sponsors excluded him on grounds that he did not meet their criteria as a viable candidate.

Hunter did win one delegate in Wyoming’s Republican county conventions on Jan. 5, where former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney won eight and ex-Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson won three. Hunter won 1 percent of the vote in both the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, and won a rounded-down 0 percent of the vote in the Michigan primary on Jan. 15, despite campaigning in the state.

As of Sept. 30 he had raised $1.9 million and had $133,000 on hand, making him the most poorly funded candidate in the Republican race. Romney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani , the Republican Party’s top fundraisers by the end of the third quarter, had raised $91 million and $80.3 million respectively at that point.

First posted Jan. 19, 2008 8:25 p.m.