The news surrounding Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign isn’t good. He’s “hunkering down” with his family to “assess his candidacy.” He’s looking at big payroll cuts. He carries his own luggage while relying on supporters to drive him around, “including one who pulled away from a Rotary meeting last week with a flat rear tire.”
Actually, that last bit is from a 2007 story about John McCain’s campaign. If you’re on Team Bush, you have to hope the McCain model applies to the former Florida governor. McCain went from being a front-runner to running a nearly broke campaign that was shedding staff.
In the end, McCain was the nominee. Rudy Giuliani, who led in national polls for longer than Donald Trump, imploded once the real voting started. He didn’t even win a single primary. McCain upset Mitt Romney and won the New Hampshire primary for the second time.
Bush would obvioulsy like a different general election outcome, but that is the most recent precedent for someone going through what the ex-governor is experiencing and still emerging from the Republican National Convention victorious. If Giuliani could undergo such a spectacular collapse, the reasoning goes, why couldn’t the far less tested Trump and Ben Carson?
McCain’s numbers exploded between late 2007 and early 2008, overtaking Giuliani for the national lead and never looking back. Why couldn’t the same happen to Bush?
Good questions. There are, however, a few differences between McCain’s situation before he rose from the political grave and Bush’s. The low point of McCain’s campaign came during the summer. Even then, he was usually polling in the double digits nationally, often comfortably so. By contrast, Bush is averaging 7 percent nationally less than 100 days out from the Iowa caucuses.
The Arizona senator of McCain-Feingold fame was never considered a big money candidate, even if he was vying for the mantle of establishment candidate. Money has always been a big part of the argument for Bush’s political strength. It remains so even after fundraising has slowed after the first group of big Bush donors maxed out and new ones have become harder to find.
Meanwhile, Trump and Carson are doing better at the state level than Giuliani. More importantly, McCain was well situated to benefit from Giuliani’s meltdown. If Trump falls apart, how many of his supporters would really gravitate toward Jeb?
McCain’s fate hinged on New Hampshire. Giuliani was the one who bet on Florida and lost, big time.
None of this is to rule out the possibility that Bush will simply wait out his rivals for the nomination. That not only worked for McCain in 2008 but also Romney in 2012. As it turned out, neither man needed to be beloved by conservative activists to win the nomination.
It’s nevertheless telling that the best case scenario for Bush is to be like a candidate who is a symbol of everything many Republicans would like to avoid in their 2016 nominee and who lost the general election to Barack Obama.
