Jeb Bush, one of the remaining contenders for the GOP Presidential nomination, has had a notoriously unsuccessful campaign, despite having the most success – by far – of the GOP pack of candidates, as documented in this New York Times article, which shows that he and his allied groups having raised $155 million, while his closest challenger in this category, Senator Cruz, is at $89.9 million. (An interesting substory is that Cruz has outraised Bush in terms of personal fundraising, while Bush’s allied groups have crushed Cruz’s allied groups. However, there are too many unknown variables to really be worth pursuing in this post.)
As my Arts Editor and I discussed the post on Senator’s Cruz campaign strategy, it occurred to me there’s a partial explanation for Jeb’s futility in Cruz’s success – so far. But let’s start with former President Bush – who supported him?
One memorable group was the evangelicals. Remember the lady who was convinced that God had picked George to be President, and said so in a TV interview?
So how important are the evangelicals in the GOP? According to this Gallup poll, quite:
And how did Jeb’s brother do with the evangelicals? They loved him, as this article, “The Real Reasons Evangelicals Love Bush,” from Christianity Today illustrates:
Yet while some evangelicals have soured on Bush, polls show the vast majority of evangelicals love him. Why?
It’s often said that they like him because he’s “one of them” and uses religious language, and that’s true–but only scratches the surface. Two new books and a new film on Bush and faith help us to see the real roots of his appeal. All three are campaign-style hagiographies but give a window into the spiritual sources of the Bush-evangelical connection: persecution, transformation, calling, and clarity.
So when Cruz swept in with an explicitly faith-based approach to the campaign, Jeb was deprived of a major group’s support enjoyed by his brother – a good 1/3 of the GOP may have ignored him in favor of the more familiar Cruz. (Similarly, former Senator Rick Santorum lost out in the same way. He won Iowa – barely – in 2012 by his popularity amongst the highly conservative and the evangelicals, while this year he polled 1% – and has since dropped out of the race, throwing his support to … Senator Cruz.)
As a former governor, Jeb comes under suspicion from many in the GOP, and as the support of many large contributors became known, he’s spattered with the mud of being part of the establishment and a possible puppet of Big Money. Recall that governmental experience is now considered a negative by the GOP these days; Jeb has it in spades.
Jeb’s bad luck comes in not realizing that the GOP is changing – but it’s not moving towards the mainstream, as one might expect from a pendulum swing, but rather ever more extreme as the moderates continue to move away from the GOP, and those who used to be too extreme for the GOP now find it more and more congenial. Whether this is a result of a takeover of the GOP, or just an unconscious slide caused by the neverending cause of purity, I’m not entirely sure, but we seem to be seeing the end of the “wait your turn” queue in GOP nomination politics, the queue that gave us Bush I, Bob Dole, Bush II, and Romney.
Brash, untried newbies such as Rubio and Cruz are butting in ahead of Bush III, Perry, Santorum, and they’ve done so by appealing to the sensibilities (if I may be so rash as to use such a word) of the newer members of the GOP – such a litany is unnecessary to repeat here, as many other commentators have pointed it out.
The winner of the GOP nomination is not clear, but the Presidential race may boil down to experience – Sanders and Clinton have it by the shovelful – vs novelty – either a businessman with zero experience, or an untried, unaccomplished Senator are the three (3) favorites in Trump, Cruz, and Rubio. In crude terms, is America still a meritocracy (which requires the voters be knowledgeable, in the truest sense of the word)? Or will we revert to tribalism, voting for the person who’s part of our group and enunciates our own prejudices with impunity?
