Josh Stockton and Shruti Gulati announced their withdrawal from the MSA presidential election on their campaign Facebook page on Saturday morning, only two days before the start of voting.

The post featured a photo of the two sitting on the Tigers Together couch with Nathan Willett and Payton Englert. It said that Stockton/Gulati “has decided to remove [themselves] from contention and merge [their] efforts with Nathan Willett and Payton Englert.”

The Willett/Englert campaign team said in an email that Stockton/Gulati’s post was “merely a public endorsement” of the campaign and that their campaign would not be receiving the remainder of the Stockton/Gulati budget.

“We appreciate this verbal expression of support and will appreciate their public support and endorsement going forward in these next few days of campaigning,” the campaign said in an email.

Their withdrawal leaves two slates, Willett/Englert and Tori Schafer/Riley de Leon. Schafer is the current vice president, and de Leon is the Department of Student Communications social media and technologies coordinator. Willett, Englert and Stockton have all been senators within the Missouri Students Association. Willett is an executive board member at his fraternity, Sigma Chi, and Englert is the 2017 director of Greek Week.

In the Facebook post, Stockton/Gulati said combining their efforts with Willett/Englert provides “a great opportunity to shatter the concepts of the MSA status quo.”

“We believe their vision to bring Tigers Together aligns with our goals towards reforming our student government,” the post reads. “It Starts With Us and Tigers Together share a better vision for Mizzou.”

The post ended with a combination of the two campaigns’ slogans, “It Starts With Tiger Together.”

Stockton, Gulati, Schafer and de Leon could not be reached for comment at the time of publication.

_Edited by Nancy Coleman | ncoleman@themaneater.com_