The Assets and Liabilities of Jeb Bush

Wall Street Journal

By Gerald Seib

May 11, 2015

The Assets and Liabilities of Jeb Bush 

Five months ago this week, Jeb Bush got a beat on the world by announcing he was forming a committee to explore running for president. That means enough time has passed to frame the Bush paradox: He is the establishment favorite in a party that almost always picks that candidate, but has walked into an election cycle in which that isn’t necessarily the case.

The powerful assets Mr. Bush brings to the table have been on full display since his December move. He can raise prodigious amounts of money from the party’s business and finance wings, and enjoys the backing of many GOP power brokers and most of his family’s network of supporters. He is an articulate candidate with a conservative record as Florida’s governor, yet crossover appeal to moderates. He is better than other governors and former governors at discussing the national-security issues that are rising on GOP voters’ priority list.

But as the weeks have gone by, it’s also been easy to see Mr. Bush’s problems within his party. Conservative skepticism is higher than some anticipated, based largely on his support for Common Core education standards and broad immigration reforms. Rival candidates— Mike Huckabee and Sen. Rand Paul in particular—have tapped into an antiestablishment strain within the party that works against Mr. Bush. The loss of two elections to Barack Obama has left some yearning for a generational change that is being exploited by—ironically enough—Sen. Marco Rubio, something of a Jeb Bush protégé.

Any rational analysis has to rate Mr. Bush as the slight favorite within an exceptionally crowded field of Republican contenders, though it’s way too early to draw definitive conclusions. What is possible, based on an analysis of polling data and the shape of the race ahead, is to define two significant problems Mr. Bush faces, as well as two big advantages:

First, the problems:

The Republican party has changed. Since his brother and father were elected, the party has become more populist and has been altered by the rise of the tea-party movement and the absorption of its messages and foot soldiers.

In a broad examination of party-identification trends, Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm that helps conduct the Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, found that the party’s three largest subgroups now are tea-party supporters, self-identified conservatives and white Southerners. Moreover, in the last few years, the Republican party has become more male in composition.

These trends don’t necessarily work to Mr. Bush’s favor. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, he is the top choice among Republicans overall, by a small margin, but scores somewhat better among women than among men, better among moderates than among conservatives, and is the top choice of just 6% of self-described tea-party supporters.

The Romney experience left a bitter aftertaste. The nomination, followed by the defeat, of Mitt Romney in 2012 has left some Republicans questioning the party’s tendency to nominate the big name whose time has come. Democrats didn’t do that when they picked Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008, the argument goes, and they won the White House twice as a result.

Mr. Bush isn’t quite the same next-in-line choice that Mr. Romney was. Still, the Romney experience has opened the way for rivals such as Sen. Ted Cruz to argue that Republicans lose general elections because they don’t excite and turn out their conservative base. While that analysis is open to question, the Journal/NBC News poll found Mr. Bush behind both Sen. Paul and Sen. Cruz among Republican primary voters who didn’t vote for Mr. Romney.

The conservative anti-Bush vote is being splintered. There is no single populist/antiestablishment/tea-party/evangelical alternative to Mr. Bush, but rather a whole series of them. That reduces the chances that any one rival can, at least for a while, reach the critical mass necessary to be seen as the singular alternative. Which leads to the second big advantage:

A long nomination contest benefits Jeb Bush. The longer a fight goes on, the more important it is to have a lot of money to wage it. Mr. Bush is tops in that category.

More than that, Mr. Bush has a plausible answer to conservative criticism of his support for Common Core education standards—that he’s for high standards at the state level, not federal coercion in imposing them—that will benefit from more time and opportunity to deliver it.

And to the extent the nominating contest moves into big swing states on the March and April calendar—Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania—it will reach relatively more natural Bush voters than may be found in some of the early states. A marathon may suit Jeb Bush just fine.

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