Jeff, who died suddenly at age 74 on Saturday evening, was primed to be on the vanguard. Starting in the mid-1970s, he turbocharged the policy agenda that culminated with Reagan’s landslide election and a mandate for massive tax cuts. But Reagan (“The only great man I ever worked for, though I didn’t know it at the time,” he once told me. “You never do.”) came around to the cuts only after Jeff proved on the ballot something that Republicans now accept as gospel: Across-the-board income tax cuts are innately popular with voters.
If he had cashed out of movement politics in 1980, Jeff’s legacy would have been set. Instead he stayed on the insurgency. When Reagan’s staff tilted against Reaganomics, he spearheaded a shadow cabinet and worked with the Democratic senator who defeated him in the 1978 general election—Bill Bradley—on the tax reform of 1986. This iteration had Ted Kennedy and Al Gore voting for a top marginal rate of 28 percent. That’s 42 percentage points, 8 years, and a world away from where he started.
By the time I began working for Jeff in 2010 at the think tank he co-founded, he had spent the previous two decades concentrating on social conservatism, to which he devoted a pair of books. He was struck by its appeal not just in Republican primaries, but with general election voters who were economically populist, rather than conservative. In a 2012 interview with the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, he identified states totaling 348 electoral votes where social conservatism held the advantage—almost all of which would go Republican in 2016.
His appreciation for populism is what emboldened him to pursue the unfinished business of supply-side economics: the gold standard. When Jeff couldn’t find a Jack Kemp protégé to champion this monetary reform in Congress, in 2014 he ran on it himself—for the very the same Senate seat nomination he had won the first time.
It was 36 years later and he was twice as old, but Jeff observed that New Jersey’s political dynamics were mostly the same. He knew the state inside out. As his campaign manager, I got to witness the reactivated candidate skills. Every speech, no matter the length, was delivered off the cuff. He gave a detailed, unfiltered opinion on everything he was asked about. He had a gift for distilling “the simplicity beyond the complexity,” a phrase Jeff used during the Reagan years. The gold standard, he would tell New Jersey voters, was just a fancy way of saying the people control the money supply.
The responses to his death from reporters, including the New Jersey press corps, have noted his kindness alongside his intellect. Jeff never cared much how the media framed him, but the compliment rings true. It also highlights what made him unique: in politics, successful people are typically known as kind or brilliant, but not both. Jeff would treat an intern like a longtime colleague and then go into a famous politician’s office to tell him why his economic plan was screwed up.
He was also charming in the rare, accessible way. When his former consulting partner, John Mueller, recounted for us how they chose not to take casino clients at their economic forecasting firm, Jeff turned to me with a smile and said, “This is why I’m still poor.”
There are undoubtedly scores of people who will miss picking up the phone to hear Jeff’s sage take on events or get his counsel. No one I knew had a better grasp of what made voters tick. Better yet, no one was as persuasive of an advocate for their particular idea set. Jeff, a San Francisco Giants fan from their origins in New York, once remarked during the World Series that the club’s steady manager, Bruce Bochy, could teach politicians how to lead. But it was really Jeff himself who this was best said of.
Jeff had the uncommon life of achieving his political breakthrough at a young age and living through its ripple effects. All of which made for a fitting coda on primary night in 2014. The Associated Press called the race for Jeff Bell in a tweet just after 11 o’clock. Back in 1978, who could have imagined all that?
