When National Review unveiled its “Against Trump” issue on January 21, Jeb Bush celebrated the arrival of reinforcements. “Welcome to the fight, all. Trump is not a conservative,” he tweeted.
It was an odd sentiment. National Review writers have been among the most outspoken critics of Donald Trump. Last fall, Rich Lowry, the magazine’s editor, wrote along with senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru that Trump “would be a disastrous champion for conservatives.” Last summer, Charles Cooke wrote of the “Trump Virus.” Jonah Goldberg was criticizing the real estate mogul long before Trump announced his candidacy and has written enough about Trump to fill a small book. And Kevin Williamson has written a small book: The Case Against Trump. No one who has casually flipped through a National Review over the past several months or spent thirty seconds on its website would think to welcome the magazine to the fight against Trump.
If Bush’s tweet was ignorant, it was also ironic. In the “fight” between Donald Trump and conservatism, Trump has had few better allies than Right to Rise, the super PAC supporting Bush’s candidacy. There will be plenty of blame to go around if Trump ends up as the Republican nominee, but Right to Rise will have earned a prominent chapter in those histories: cable and network television gave Trump endless hours of free publicity; influential conservative voices explained away his liberalism, excused his excesses, and legitimized his crazy; and Right to Rise, like an all-pro right guard, helped clear a path for Trump by blocking several of his would-be tacklers, in particular Marco Rubio.
This was no accident. It was the plan.
“If other campaigns wish that we’re going to uncork money on Donald Trump, they’ll be disappointed,” Mike Murphy, chief strategist of Right to Rise, told the Washington Post in August. “Trump is, frankly, other people’s problem.” In an October interview with Bloomberg, he said: “I’d love a two-way race with Trump at the end.”
It’s entirely possible that there will be a two-way race with Trump at some point before the nomination is decided. But it’s nearly inconceivable that the other candidate in that head-to-head contest will be Jeb Bush. (Nearly inconceivable only because nothing is actually inconceivable this cycle.)
Bush’s campaign and the Right to Rise super PAC supporting him have churned through more than half of the $100 million-plus they raised in an effort to boost his candidacy. It hasn’t worked. When Bush first announced his interest in running, in late December of 2014, he was the prohibitive frontrunner at 18 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. When he formally announced his candidacy in mid-June, he was still the frontrunner, at nearly 11 percent in the RCP average. In the Fox News national poll released Friday, Bush was at 4 percent.
Skeptical of national horserace polls? Fair enough. In Iowa, Bush sits in fifth place at 4.5 percent after more than $10 million in pro-Bush ad spending. In New Hampshire, where he’s focused his efforts, and the campaign and its allies have spent some $25 million, he’s in sixth place at 8.2 percent. His national favorability/unfavorability rating, per a HuffPost pollster aggregation, is 32/54 – the worst in the Republican field. (Donald Trump is 40/54).
If the Right 2 Rise effort hasn’t helped Bush, it does seem to have had an effect on Rubio. On September 10, Rubio stood at 5.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. Over the next three months, Rubio would nearly triple his support – to nearly 15 percent by the end of the first week of December. He had climbed into a virtual tie with Ted Cruz (15.5) as the second choice of GOP voters to Trump (29.3).
The same thing happened in Iowa, where Rubio went from seventh place with 5 percent of the vote to fourth place with 14 percent. In New Hampshire, Rubio went from tenth place at slightly less than 4 percent, to second place at 12 percent. In South Carolina, he moved from sixth place at 4 percent to fourth place at 13 percent.
The trajectory was clear and the gains were steady. But that momentum stopped rather suddenly. Why? Many reasons, to be sure. One of the most important? Right to Rise.
On December 7, the pro-Bush super PAC launched its all-out offensive on Rubio, the first of what would become a $20 million assault on the Florida senator that ran nationally on Fox News and extensively in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. The first ad asked, called “Desk,” asked voters to imagine Rubio – along with Ted Cruz and Donald Trump – in the Oval Office. Rubio “skipped crucial national security hearings and votes just to campaign,” the narrator says. That ad was followed by another, “Briefing,” that also hit Rubio for missing votes and a third, “Promotion,” which alleged that Rubio was missing votes even before he decided to run for president. In early January, the super PAC went up with an ad called “Vane,” which portrayed Rubio as a flip-flopper on immigration and “just another Washington politician we can’t trust.”
Sprinkled among these Rubio attack ads were spots criticizing Governor Chris Christie and Governor John Kasich as ineffective. But the main target was Rubio – on the receiving end of some $20 million of the roughly $22 million that Right to Rise spent on negative ads between early December and this past weekend.
Remarkably, Rubio hasn’t lost much support over that time. The ads seem to have stalled his momentum more than reversed it. (He’s down three points nationally; three in Iowa, and two in New Hampshire). Rubio has positioned himself as the compromise candidate. Jack Whitver, a state senator who often introduces Rubio on the stump, put it this way in Cedar Rapids earlier this month. “In the past, we’ve had a bad choice, between a moderate that everyone says can win this election or a true conservative that everyone says can’t win the election. This year, we can have it all. We can have a true conservative in Marco Rubio, who has a proven conservative record, but who can also win the election.”
To some extent, with their options dwindling, Bush and Right to Rise had little choice but to try to shut down Rubio’s path in the so-called “establishment lane” to limit one side of that two-way appeal. Bush didn’t run for president to help Rubio – or Kasich or Christie, for that matter; he ran to win the nomination. And given the odd combination his ever-growing unpopularity and his ability to raise mountains of cash, perhaps this was his only strategy. But playing it out will likely have very high costs.
So, while it’s unbecoming of Bush to pretend that he fought alone against Trump, he deserves some credit for speaking out personally and sometimes forcefully against the excesses of Trumpism. But with each passing day, as Team Bush uses its paid media to target virtually everyone other than Trump, and to try to bury Marco Rubio, it becomes more and more likely that the lasting legacy of Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential bid will be its prominent role in making Donald Trump the nominee and contributing to the crisis of conservatism that will follow.
And where’s the joy in that?
