A truly stunning development, as in: most readers might be stunned to know Bill de Blasio was still running for president at all. Four months after NYC’s mayor inexplicably jumped into the race, he crawled back out of it from the same perch as his launch. De Blasio told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “it’s just not my time”:

Who knew that a “robot tax” wouldn’t invigorate a presidential campaign? The Associated Press politely reminds readers that de Blasio was actually in the race while noting that he failed to “gain traction.” Or anything else, either:

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has ended his campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

De Blasio struggled to gain traction in a sprawling field of Democrats seeking the presidency. He announced his decision in an MSNBC interview on Friday.

De Blasio launched his bid in May, but his campaign largely failed to take off.

It didn’t “largely” fail to launch; it never ignited at all. As of today, de Blasio’s RCP aggregate polling score is a whopping 0.2%, trailing former Pennsylvania congressman Joe Sestak’s 0.3.% The mayor of South Bend, Indiana scores twenty-five times better in the RCP average than the mayor of New York City, which has ninety times more people in it.

The AP also notes that de Blasio started off his campaign by “div[ing] into an insult match with President Donald Trump.” Guess who got the last laugh today — and made sure everyone knew it?

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1175017370139729926

So what prompted de Blasio’s decision to retire? It can’t really be a sudden realization that it’s not his time. Polling hasn’t ever shown that de Blasio was within a decade of “his time” as a presidential candidate. He missed out on the third debate and had no chance of making up enough ground to get into the fourth, which means that his prospects for ego-boosting national coverage on the cheap was evaporating.

Those DNC rules for weeding out the lower-tier candidates on their own work pretty well, when they allow the rules to do so. They might want to consider tightening them up a little more to shake off the rest of the vanity candidates.