Rick Santorum started the 2012 presidential race as an asterisk seemingly destined for footnote status.

But Mitt Romney made Santorum a contender -- so much so that, if the now all-but-certain Republican nominee loses to Democrat Barack Obama in November, Santorum may merit a chapter of his own in the "Making of the President" books.

That's because, though Santorum is now out of the running, the campaign that he ended on Tuesday (appropriately enough at Gettysburg) will continue to define Romney.

Santorum's improbable rise from bit player to potentially definitional figure in the 2012 contest was entirely the result of Anybody But Romney sentiment within a fractured Republican Party.

No one has been running for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination for longer than Romney. He began campaigning back in the middle of George Bush's second term, stumbled through a 2008 bid and then kept on running.

Romney was almost always the front-runner.

But he was never loved, or even liked all that much, by Republican voters. Even to the last -- in the Wisconsin and Maryland primaries of April 3 -- Romney could not get 50 percent of the vote. Republican voters in 13 primary and caucus states gave wins to someone other than Romney. Four states put Romney in third place. Where Romney did win, it was more often than not by narrow margins -- as in battleground states such as Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. And though the former governor of Massachusetts built and maintained a steady delegate lead, most Republicans voted for someone else -- as of April 3, only 41 percent of GOP primary and caucus voters had backed Romney. The combined vote for other Republicans was roughly 6.6 million to around 4.5 million for Mr. Mitt.

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The story of the 2012 Republican presidential race was not of Romney's growing popularity. To the end, the candidate and his Super PAC had to spend dramatically in order to scrape out victories against the always underfunded and often bumbling Santorum campaign. No, the story of the 2012 Republican presidential race was of a desperate search by most Republicans for Anyone But Romney. They never trusted the independent who gave money to Democrats turned liberal Republican turned moderate Republican turned sort of conservative turned right-wing ranter. The great mass of Republican tried as hard as they could to find an alternative: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, New Gingrich again and, at last, Santorum. The defeated former senator from Pennsylvania, who was never even all that big a deal when he served in Congress and whose theocratic stances disqualified him even in the eyes of serious GOP strategists, never really got a break. He won the Iowa caucuses, but had the victory confirmed weeks after the headline gave the starting state to Romney. Then he bumbled his way through New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, fighting with Gingrich for anti-Romney status. Only when the race moved to caucus states such as Minnesota and Iowa, where his extreme religious-right base could sustain him, did Santorum start to get real traction. But when Santorum's moment finally came, enough of the party's Christian conservative establishment fell behind him to give Romney a real problem.

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