title:  Sad Sack Santorum Visited Over 70 Pizza Ranches In Iowa – And The CEO Endorsed Trump
text: Nobody seemed more desperate to win Iowa by sheer force of will than Rick Santorum. The perennial Republican also-ran staked his entire campaign on convincing enough ultra-conservative Iowans that he was their guy, and didn t just come up short   he hardly came up at all.But if Iowan voters didn t know Santorum was running, the hapless employees at the state s ubiquitous Pizza Ranch restaurants sure did. For some reason   some very, very insane reason   Santorum decided to almost exclusively stump in the pizza chain s locales. By the close of the primary, Santorum had racked up an impressive (or sad, depending on how you look at it) 120 visits, that s nearly two visits per location.CNN s Chris Moody covered the Santorum s Iowa bid, and while he clearly tried to remain objective   and we give them an  A  for effort, really   his recollection of Santorum s sad campaign radiates a sense of bafflement and failure.About forty die-hard Santorumites joined together in a private room at a Pizza Ranch restaurant. The evening was full of nostalgia, sadness and hope, and a pinch of denial, to celebrate a man who hosted more than 700 events in the Hawkeye State. It has been an honor. It really has,  Santorum said.  I hope we have another opportunity, but my guess is that when we come in on Air Force One, we re not going to have these types of deals because we re going to have a country to run. The crowd laughed, lovingly, knowing that what he said wasn t true and probably would never be.There may be nothing more fatalistic than holding what is probably your last campaign rally in the back room of a greasy pizza shop and joking about how someday you may be unable to come in because you re too busy on Air Force One. It s never going to happen   that s the punchline.To twist the knife of failure just a little bit harder, Santorum s Pizza Ranch base of operation is actually already spoken for. The company s CEO, Adrie Groeneweg, announced just weeks ago that he would be endorsing Trump.Groeneweg has never endorsed a candidate before and he has also never caucused.  It was just something my dad has always done,  he explained. This year, Groeneweg said he d go to caucus for Trump in February.Hilariously, Trump didn t even have to show up beforehand. In trademark fashion, Trump only decided he liked Pizza Ranch after he learned the CEO endorsed him.Meanwhile, all the pizza slices in the state couldn t buy Santorum some love.But there is one silverlining to this story. Taking pity on poor Santorum, Pizza Ranch did throw him a bone. They gave him a t-shirt and made him an  honorary employee. Rick Santorum is made an honorary Pizza Ranch employee pic.twitter.com/TeP9tg4xJ9  Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) February 1, 2016Not that he ll have time to do as much pizza cooking and toilet scrubbing as he may want to, what with flying on Air Force One and all.Featured image from Twitter