Tell me how you made your decision finally to pull out of the race.

We made the decision because it was the right thing to do for all concerned. We had considerable success in the campaign in a variety of dimensions, and in raising substantially the climate crisis in national conversation. We had success in developing the gold standard of what I really believe is a governing document for the clean energy economy. We had success in driving candidates in what you might think of as an arms race, a good arms race.

We had late success in getting momentum, but it only started to kick into gear three weeks ago with the second debate, because that was the first chance we had to have any national impact whatsoever. There was a big response to that, 42,000 donors in three weeks. But we did not have the polling numbers that would have been necessary to move forward with the debate. We felt that was a realistic requirement to really be in the hunt to win the nomination. It was a straightforward decision at that point.

Who did I speak with? I spoke with my wife of 46 years, my campaign team. But it really was not a very difficult decision. There was great clarity at that point.

So in the end it was the numbers?

Yes. We could not meet the 2 percent. Although our momentum came, it came too late and we had to exhaust our finances generating the donors and did not have the wherewithal to communicate or increase our name ID. We never had enough resources to improve our name identification.