Jeb Bush sinking to ‘just another candidate’ status
Think back to January. Then consider the Republican field that was lining up to run for president then. Less than six months ago the clear favorite to represent the elephants against another ‘shoo-in’ on the donkey side was former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
Fast forward to June. The latest poll shows that Jeb is no longer as popular as many thought he would be. Based on numbers compiled by a Washington Post/ABC News survey, conducted between May 28 and June 1, Bush now trails Rand Paul and Scott Walker (shown in photo above with Bush and Marco Rubio) in what so far is a four-man race to represent the GOP in November 2016.
It’s a close race for sure: Paul and Walker lead with 11 percent, while Jeb and Marco trail with 10 percent.
The fact is nobody expected Bush to be trailing, though. Especially not when you consider all the money he has collected to date – without even declaring his candidacy.
Money, as we know, is the mother’s milk of American politics, and Bush has been raking it in. But has it helped?
It seems that the idea that Jeb was invincible is slowly dissipating. And if that is the case, the field becomes even tougher for Bush going forward, because as some have written, Jeb’s main argument for garnering the nomination was the feeling of inevitability his people had managed to create at the beginning of this race. At this point, it’s become a free-for-all with no clear favorite.
And as the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza writes, “… now, Jeb is just another guy who could win — the same status Walker, Rubio, Rand and even Huckabee enjoy in the race. That makes the next year much more of an even-playing-field fight. That’s not one I am convinced that Bush, given his record and his approach, can win.”
What went wrong?
Bush’s non-declared campaign seems to be deflating instead of building momentum. It’s a phenomenon many are finding hard to believe. Take a look: A late March Washington Post/ABC poll had Bush at 20 percent, seven points better than Ted Cruz, who trailed him at the time with 13 percent.
Cillizza believes the problem may be that “Bush is far more of a centrist on both immigration and Common Core, the national education standards program, than the Republican party base.”
And although Bush has so far demonstrated to be ill-prepared to run for president, and with little if any charisma – as compared to a Rubio or a Walker, for example – the fact remains that even if he was to run a perfect race, Bush might find it hard to win a national Republican contest. It seems the party has become a monster that eats its own – especially when you veer, even slightly, from the party line which at this time is to the right, ideologically, of Attila the Hun.
