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Jim Gilmore and George Pataki are currently running for president but have virtually no chance of winning the primary. I doubt most voters would even be able to pick them in a lineup.
They are not really campaigning, they don't have any organization, so why not quit?
Are there any financial and/or tax reasons to keep the campaign active, even if only on paper?
Did you know who Jim Gilmore and George Pataki were before they ran for president? Unless you happen to be living in Virginia or New York or are a huge politics buff, you likely haven't. But now you know them. See?
Running for president makes them better known to lots of people outside of their usual circle. This enhances their celebrity status and increases the sales value of their personality. Even though they might not win this election, going through with it might help them to win other elections for lower positions later. Or at least make some money by selling some books and getting a well-paying job in the industry.
It also allows one to get a larger audience for their agenda and soap-box their opinion. Just by being a candidate, their statements and opinions get compared to that of other candidates and thus get far more public attention. I suspect this is one reason why, for example, Bernie Sanders hasn't yet folded against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic preliminaries. His social-democratic agenda is quite a minority viewpoint among Americans, but his campaign gives him the opportunity to convince more and more people of it. It might not help him personally, but it might help his ideas to become more popular in the future.
There are many reasons.
Many presidents started off as candidates not likely to win (ie Obama, Reagen). You never know when lighting in a bottle catches and they end up winning. Pataki is a popular moderate EX- Gov of NY, he would make an excellent president IMHO.
Even if a candidate has no chance of winning the primary, they might win delegates to send to the national party convention, where those delegates get a say in determining the party platform for the next four years. This presumably affects the ideological direction of the party but I'm not clear how.
And as others have pointed out, the presidential campaign is a national platform for spreading the candidate's ideas. The candidate might be able to force the frontrunner to adopt their position, as Clinton was forced to do several times when running against Sanders.
Or a candidate can take advantage the national platform to promote themselves. Candidates often publish bestselling memoirs during their campaign, or leverage their name recognition in to paid positions as "expert" commentators for the 24 hour news networks, as Howard Dean has done, or bigger ratings for their reality TV shows, as Donald Trump will be able to do.
Some candidates run to bring more attention toward their agenda, for instance: Ron Paul did it to wake people up into Libertarianism.
Running for office is a good excuse to ask for funding without liability. That might be a good reason.
