How The 1 Percent Club Is (Or Is Not) Running For President

— -- It may be lonely at the top, but it’s also tough campaigning at the bottom.

Several candidates in the crowded 2016 presidential field are scraping the bottom of the barrel in the polls, vying for every fraction of a percentage point and spinning any tick upward as a sign of real momentum.

Support on the Republican side is currently splintered among 15 candidates. On the Democratic side, two main candidates (and one main maybe-candidate) have left the others in the dust.

So how do you run for President when you can barely squeeze out 1 percent of your party’s support? Here’s a look at how the lower-tier candidates in this 2016 field are handling running on empty.

Throwing in the Towel: Scott Walker and Rick Perry

For Rick Perry and Scott Walker, the answer was to give up.

After failing to gain any momentum in both national and state-level polls and struggling to pay his staffers to keep his campaign afloat, Rick Perry decided to call it quits. The former Texas Governor once had frontrunner status in the 2012 election, but never got his 2016 operation completely off the ground.

Then Scott Walker, who had led the first-in-the-nation caucuses in Iowa just six weeks earlier, dramatically fell from the top of the pack, eventually landing at less than 1 percent. He also faced problems financially maintaining the massive campaign infrastructure he had built.

Whether Perry hoped to preserve his legacy or Walker is leaving the door open to 2020, both opted to end their bids instead of clinging to hope of scraping or clawing their way back from the basement. But both still asserted their advice the race’s outcome, bashing frontrunner Donald Trump even as they stepped aside. Perry called for Republicans to not “indulge nativist appeals that divide the nation further” while Walker called for Republicans to drop out and consolidate against the real estate mogul.

Starting From the Very, Very Bottom: Jim Gilmore and Lincoln Chafee

For other contenders, it’s just about trying to get on the map. At all.

Former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore is the only candidate so far to be excluded from a debate. He was left off the CNN debate stage because he couldn’t hit an average of 1 percent in at least three national polls.

In a Quinnipiac University poll last week, almost eight in 10 Republicans hadn’t heard enough about Gilmore to have an opinion of him. Among those who did, 13 percent said it was unfavorable, compared to only 8 percent favorable, the lowest of the 15 candidates in the race.

Things got even worse for Democrats Lincoln Chafee. In the same poll, 85 percent of Democrats didn’t know enough about Chafee to form an opinion of him. Of those who did, 9 percent had an unfavorable view and only 5 percent had a favorable opinion.

And while Chafee is occasionally at 1 percent in national surveys, pollster Monmouth University isn’t having the same luck. Out of almost 1,500 registered Democratic voters interviewed by the firm since the former Rhode Island governor announced his presidential bid in June, not one single respondent has picked him as their favorite presidential candidate.

But they aren’t giving in – continuing to hope for a moment in the 2016 campaign that will earn them even a sliver of the spotlight. A Gilmore spokesperson told ABC News that “the governor is in the race to stay.”

Yell And Scream: Martin O’Malley and Bobby Jindal

Some other 1 percent-ers aren’t going down without a fight.

Bobby Jindal has gone on a name-calling spree in an effort to drag down frontrunner Donald Trump. The Louisiana Governor called Trump an “egomaniacal madman,” a “power-hungry shark” who “eats whatever is in front of him,” and a “non-serious carnival act.” He joked about how Trump has never read the Bible because Trump himself isn’t in the Bible. And is it working? Jindal has reached as high as 4 percent this month in the crucial state of Iowa.

Meanwhile, Martin O’Malley has led a full-out revolt against his own party, trying to increase the number of opportunities he has to topple Hillary Clinton on the debate stage. The former Maryland governor has led the charge against top Democrats and their current plan to host only six Democratic debate during the fight for the nomination.

He has placed all his chips on earning more debates, bringing brutal criticism against the DNC and saying he thinks the debate schedule is stacked in favor of Hillary Clinton. “This is nothing short of political malpractice,” he said in a statement after pointing to the huge audience for the GOP debate. But DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz isn’t budging: she has stood firm that the debate schedule will not change.

Wait And See: The Rest

What about Lindsey Graham? Jim Webb? George Pataki? Rick Santorum? Well, we wait and see.

Many pundits are asking which candidate is going to be the next to bite the dust, gradually narrowing one of the widest presidential fields in recent memory.

But Rick Santorum remembers the 2012 election well, when he was at just 1 percent support in a national ABC News/Washington Post poll in early November before climbing to win the Iowa caucuses exactly two months later. Are others hoping for the same kind of unexpected surge to the top tier?

It’s certainly possible. After all, Carly Fiorina was polling at 1 percent for most of the summer and has since rocketed to the top tier of candidates. But for now, this group of 2016 hopefuls remains in the bottom of the pack.