“I think it’s wide-open right now,” Carson said of the contest in South Carolina. “And I’m hoping to do extremely well there.”

Asked if he would withdraw from the race if he doesn’t do well in future contests, Carson said he has an obligation to the people who drafted him to remain in the race. “You cant just turn your back on those people,” Carson said.

“You have to recognize I’m in this in a different way than anybody else is,” he said of his opponents. “This is something that, I guess, was part of their political ambition. For me, I was drafted…and those same people are saying to me, ‘please, please, please don’t drop out, don’t listen to any of the pundits, don’t listen to the polls, just keep hanging in there, your stronger states are coming up.’ So I take all that into consideration, and we’ll continue to assess it on a regular basis.”