Gilmore is on the "There was a guy named Gilmore?" list. He gets his own category, to make up for being so utterly not in the race that I forgot about him.
Is the 2016 race more crowded? Yes, by a factor of about 2-1 (8 major candidates versus 16). However, let's look at poll positions as well. At his lowest, Gingrich was 5th out of 8. Not great, but still middle-of-the-pack.
At his BEST this time around since announcing, Perry has been 9th (out of 11 at the time). He was actually polling at his best (~8%, 5th place) last summer well before anybody had announced. His campaign was stillborn. He started well in the back of the pack and has done nothing to move up. That's not the kind of campaign that will continue to attract money.
Now granted, Perry is using the same playbook as Jeb -- offloading most of the ground game to his super PACs and running a shoestring official campaign. But even then his Super PACs (he has three of them) are getting crushed in fundraising by most other candidates.
@maniac: I would have to disagree. I'm not just looking at the numbers, I'm taking into account previous cycles (hence my comparison of the 2012 cycle with its sine waves of different candidates vs. the Trump ascent).
I'd say Santorum has the same problem as Perry -- his campaign was dead the moment it started. Both overperformed for a while (and in part due to deep-pocketed backers) in 2012 but ultimately faced an establishment candidate with a deep support base within the party.
The dynamics are quite different this time around. If anything, Santorum and Perry are now "establishment" candidates by virtue of their previous runs. In 2012, they were sorta fresh and new. In 2016, it's "oh, these losers again". Which goes a long way to explain the utter lack of traction they got out of the gate (ditto for Mike Huckabee, though sitting out the 2012 cycle seemed to refresh his image a bit).
Honestly I would have thought Trump would suffer the same problem, sort of a Ross Perot "Is he for real this time or just fucking around like usual?" vibe, but the guy hit paydirt with his tack on immigration. Either he got lucky or he recognized a swelling nativist sentiment among the Tea Party and capitalized on it at just the right time.