Ben Carson speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in Maryland. Photograph by Ron Sachs/AP

This spring, as you may have noticed, there is a true outsider—a newcomer to electoral politics—who is leading the race to become the next Republican candidate for President. Even observers who have been paying close attention may find it hard to explain how, exactly, this situation came to pass. And many of them may find it surprisingly easy to forget that, just a few months ago, there were two of them: dual (but not quite duelling) political amateurs, both of them outpolling the professionals. From early September until early December, the Republican leaders in the RealClearPolitics polling average were Donald J. Trump and his unlikely counterpart, Dr. Ben Carson. But while Trump continued to defy pundits’ expectations, Carson fulfilled them: in the months leading up to the Iowa caucus, his poll numbers collapsed. And on Friday he said, “I am leaving the campaign trail”—although by then, the trail had long since left him.

In temperament as well as trajectory, Carson was the anti-Trump, a pediatric neurosurgeon whose eerily calm manner became a running joke—he delivered his stump speeches and debate responses with all the vehemence of a somniloquist. To many of his supporters, he was a hero twice over, first for his surgical successes and second for his speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast, when he had delivered a sharp (if implicit) critique of the policies of President Obama, who was sitting a few feet away. Carson always maintained that he was drafted into the Presidential race by his supporters, and it was tempting to believe him. He told the Washington Post that running for President “wasn’t something I particularly wanted to do.” And he recalled telling the Lord, “If you really want me to do this, then you will have to open the doors. I’m not going to push them open.” And from the campaign’s launch, last May, to its crash, last month, Carson was by far the least pushy candidate in the field, and surely one of the least pushy major candidates in recent history.

The political scientists Matt Grossman and David Hopkins argue that Republicans and Democrats are not only different political parties but different kinds of political parties: the Republican Party is “an agent of an ideological movement,” while the Democratic Party is “a coalition of social groups.” Certainly this theory seems to fit Carson, who was beloved by Republicans for his tendency to address contentious issues by making broad appeals to fundamental values: in his speeches, the words “founders” and “freedom” made frequent appearances, and audiences often came away thinking less about Carson’s policies and more about his character. To many of his fans, he embodied the fundamental goodness that America once had, and somehow lost. Last fall, when Carson was riding high, he drew enthusiastic crowds that responded to his peculiar knack for delivering dire warnings calmly and almost happily. “Anything that we do to add to the debt right now is almost like treason,” he told a group of doctors in New Hampshire, as if this were a simple matter of common sense, and common decency.

At times, Carson’s campaign seemed to be two campaigns at once: a high-minded seminar on American values, coexisting with a rather more worldly network of Carson-related businesses. And, at times, it was hard to tell which category his Presidential campaign belonged in, especially when he announced that he would spend most of October promoting his most recent book instead of campaigning. (In fact, these promotional activities were often indistinguishable from campaigning, which only made the categories harder to separate.) The campaign was proud of its ability to raise money in small increments, but it spent much of the money it raised on fund-raising expenses, which made the whole enterprise seem suspiciously like a self-perpetuating money machine—perhaps one with an only incidental interest in putting Carson into the White House. A few weeks ago, Carson told CNN that some of his former staffers “didn’t really seem to understand finances,” although he added a suggestive afterthought: “maybe they did—maybe they were doing it on purpose.” And Carson delivered a forthright self-diagnosis to Katie Couric. “We probably had the wrong team in place—people who probably had different objectives than I did,” he said. He expressed disappointment with some of the people connected to his campaign, and added, “I’m also disappointed that I trusted people without really vetting them carefully.”

In Carson’s telling, he “rectified” his problem with unvetted aides, and “the situation changed dramatically.” But it’s probably no coincidence that his popularity began to erode in the weeks after the ISIS attacks in Paris, and then the mass shooting in San Bernardino, which pushed the focus of the campaign toward foreign policy, which was never Carson’s strength. In a brutal New York _Times _article, Duane Clarridge, a former C.I.A. officer who was one of Carson’s advisers, said, “Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East.” (The article described Claridge as “a top adviser” to Carson; a spokesperson responded that Clarridge was “not one of Dr. Carson’s top advisers,” calling him “an elderly gentleman.”) And Carson was not helped, either, by his habit of disappearing into his podium during the Republican debates, where pushiness tended to be rewarded. He finished fourth in Iowa, eighth in New Hampshire, and sixth in South Carolina.

And yet, fittingly, even Carson’s withdrawal was a little bit confusing and anticlimactic: having wandered, rather hesitatingly, into the campaign, now Carson was wandering out. After another poor showing this past Tuesday, Carson released a statement saying he was skipping the next Republican debate. “I do not see a political path forward,” he wrote, but he added, “this grassroots movement on behalf of ‘We the People’ will continue.” On Friday, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he backed into his big announcement. “I’m hopeful that some people—now that I am leaving the campaign trail,” he said, and then he was forced to pause mid-sentence, to accept a rousing ovation. This was an awkward moment, but also a moving one—proof of the enormous affection that Carson still inspires.

Carson resigned from medicine three years ago, and at CPAC he affirmed that he would continue in politics. “I’ll be involved in a lot of different things, including My Faith Votes, which is an organization that is going to try to help the faith community to recognize how important their vote is,” he said. “Because in 2012, twenty-five million evangelicals did not vote.” When Carson was riding high, it was thanks in large part to evangelical voters: a Quinnipiac poll from November showed that he was the preferred candidate of thirty-two per cent of evangelical Republicans; Trump, in second place, attracted only eighteen per cent. Carson himself is a Seventh Day Adventist, and Adventists haven’t always been considered part of the evangelical mainstream; last year, he withdrew from a planned speech at a Southern Baptist Convention event, partly because some pastors complained. And while Carson has talked fluently and compellingly about God’s role in his own life, he tended to avoid explicit appeals to faith in his own stump speeches. Even at CPAC, as he announced his new faith-based initiative, he didn’t talk much about how faith informed his politics, except to disavow the notion, which he attributed to Obama, that America is “not a Judeo-Christian nation.” (During a 2009 trip to Turkey, Obama said, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation; we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”)