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Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, dropped his bid for the Republican nomination for president on Sunday morning, saying his disappointing performance in Iowa’s straw poll convinced him that his campaign had run its course.

Just hours after his third-place finish in Iowa, Mr. Pawlenty said on ABC’s “This Week” program that his message “didn’t get the kind of traction we needed and hoped for” in order to continue.

“There are a lot of other choices in the race,” he said. “The audience, so to speak, was looking for something different.”

Mr. Pawlenty informed his supporters on a conference call Sunday morning before his television appearance that he was ending his candidacy. He thanked his supporters in the call, two participants said, but acknowledged that he had decided overnight that his candidacy could not proceed.

Just NO gravitas as a leader.

The race is now between Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.

Two-time candidate Mitt Romney and tea party upstart Michele Bachmann are neck and neck leading the pack, and retired pizza chief Herman Cain is in third place in a new Des Moines Register Iowa Poll of likely participants in the state’s Republican presidential caucuses.

The results are bad news for the earnest Tim Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor who is in single digits despite a full-throttle campaign.

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and business executive, claims 23 percent, and Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman and evangelical conservative, garners 22 percent. Neither has done heavy lifting in Iowa.

The rest of the Republican field is at least 12 points behind them.

As, I have said for the past few weeks, this race is boiling down to one between Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann. The only wild cards in the race are whether Texas Governor Rick Perry will run and of course, what Sarah Palin will do. Palin is traveling to Iowa this week for the debut of her documentary.

• Republicans still give Romney the highest favorability rating among announced candidates, at 61 percent. Palin, who’s keeping everyone guessing about her intentions, is holding steady, too, with a 63 percent favorability rating.
• Bachmann’s favorability rating jumped from 41 percent to 54 percent among Republicans. A third still have no opinion about her, and it’s too soon to tell if her boost will endure or was a June phenomenon.
• Huntsman, who announced his candidacy this week but still is relatively unknown nationally, had a 23 percent favorability rating among Republicans. He’s gotten better known — 59 percent had no opinion about him in the latest poll, down slightly from 66 percent a month earlier. But the result was an increase in those with an unfavorable opinion, from 11 percent to 17 percent, with a greater uptick among tea party supporters.
• Pawlenty, one of the first to get into the race, saw his favorable ratings rise 10 percentage points to 43 percent. His support among tea party backers was up 11 points.

The poll was conducted June 16-20 by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cellphone interviews with 1,001 adults nationwide and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. The survey included 429 Republicans, and that subset had a larger, 6.2 percentage point margin of error.

This is a national poll and still has Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin as the leaders.

Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty are gaining in favorability because they are becoming better known.

I want to see the polling with Sarah Palin out of the race and Rick Perry in, but we will have to wait for these match-ups until toward the end of summer.

Republicans’ support for Mitt Romney as their party’s 2012 presidential nominee has increased significantly to 24%, compared with 17% in late May. As a result, Romney has widened his advantage over Sarah Palin in the latest update on rank-and-file Republicans’ nomination preferences.

Going into tonight’s first GOP Presidential debate (without Sarah Palin in the field, by the way), Mitt Romney clearly is the front-runner for the GOP nomination. Unless another candidate emerges, the path to the GOP nomination should be Romney’s to lose.

These results are based on a June 8-11 USA Today/Gallup poll, conducted on the eve of a candidate debate in New Hampshire that will be the first to include some of the better-known candidates.

Romney appears to have gotten a boost in recent weeks after the official announcement of his candidacy. Gallup’s prior update of May 20-24 came just after former co-leaders Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump announced they were not candidates for the nomination; that poll showed Romney and Palin in a virtual tie. Since then, Romney’s support has increased and Palin’s has been flat, leaving Romney with an eight-percentage-point advantage.

That is the largest numerical lead Gallup has measured for any candidate since it first began measuring nomination preferences in September. In that initial September poll, Romney held a seven-point advantage over the field of candidates. Romney or Huckabee held slim margins of no more than four points in subsequent polls.

No candidate besides Romney has shown a significant increase in support since the May update, though Rick Santorum, who also recently announced his official candidacy, saw his support rise from 2% to 6%. Meanwhile, support for Newt Gingrich, whose campaign has been off to a rocky start since his official announcement last month, is now at 5%, a slight decline since May. The high point for Gingrich was 13% in November.

And, Romney’s lead over the field expands with Sarah Palin out of the field.

Let’s look at the graph:

Note with Sarah Palin gone, Michele Bachmann does not rise substantially in the polls with Palin voters being redistributed throughout the field. However, Bachmann will stick in Iowa and be able to gain momentum there. Whereas, this is a national poll.

What are the demographics of the GOP voters?

The graph:

So, what does this all mean?

Mitt Romney is the early front-runner and the only challenger who is close in the polls is Sarah Palin, who has not decided whether to run or not. A number of candidates remain in the field but their chances of winning the nomination appear remote.

Perhaps tonight’s GOP Presidential debate will deliver some momentum to the third and fourth tier candidates. But, I doubt it. This race is Romney’s to win or lose.

Romney may be emerging as a front-runner in a GOP race that has been characterized to date by its lack of a leading candidate. Republican nomination contests usually have a clear front-runner, and that candidate often goes on to win. But that did not hold true in the last presidential election cycle, when Rudy Giuliani led in national preference polls throughout 2007 but performed poorly in the actual nominating contests in 2008. Additionally, even if Romney were to expand his lead into the double digits in the coming months, he still would rate as one of the weakest Republican front-runners in recent GOP nominating history.

Romney remains behind lesser-known candidates Cain and Bachmann in Gallup’s measure of positive intensity toward candidates, though his score seems to be on the rise.

Whether Romney is actually assuming the mantle of the front-runner will be clear in future polls. The current results could be a short-term bounce due to increased attention paid to his campaign after his official entry into the race, or could indicate a more lasting shift in preferences that has put him in the top position in the GOP field.