Giuliani ends Florida campaign before dwindled crowds

It appears that Giuliani's bid for the White House is effectively over:

The former New York mayor invested all his hopes on winning Florida. He virtually ignored the early states, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and spent more than 60 days campaigning in Florida.

Polls suggest that strategy is going to fail and that, when the votes are counted on Tuesday night, Giuliani's hopes of the White House will be effectively over.

Only about 100 supporters turned out at the airport for a campaign stop billed as a "rally". They were noisy, drowning out his short speech with chants of "Rudy, Rudy", but the poor numbers suggest much of the energy has gone out of his campaign.

Rudy is insisting that the polls are wrong and that he is going to win Florida. He bases this claim on some 500,000 Republican votes which were cast via the state's early voting system before his campaign went into freefall, which he insists will be votes for him.

That may be wishful thinking, but for hyperbole to rally the troops, he really did reach out and hit the stars yesterday:

"We will win in Florida. We will win on February 5. We will win the Republican nomination and we will win the White House," the former Republican favourite claimed.

The extraordinary thing about Rudy's Floridian campaign has been that the longer he has remained in Florida, the more money he has spent there and the more they actually got to know him, the less popular he has become.

The sign on the side of his bus claims that "Florida is Rudy Country". We'll know soon enough...

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Tags: Rudy Giuliani, Florida, US elections 2008, Republican nominations