Note from Senior Management: Daniel Larson, Senior Editor of The American Conservative, brings this analysis of the Jeb Bush narrative. We reprint here.
As usual, Mark Halperin is hilariously wrong:
Finally, the most macro significant question for any Republican putting him or herself forward to beat Clinton is this: what states can you win that Romney lost? For Bush, the easy answer includes Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Virginia [bold mine-DL]. If he runs a strong campaign, Bush could perhaps compete in California and possibly New Jersey and Michigan.
I don’t think Bush is likely to be the next Republican nominee for reasons I’ve laid out before, but it’s worth pointing out a few of the more important flaws in Halperin’s “analysis” here. According to fairly recent polling, most Floridians (53%) don’t want Jeb Bush running for president, and in a hypothetical match-up with Clinton he receives just 44% in the state where he was governor for eight years. So it’s not just fantasy to imagine Bush carrying Wisconsin, Iowa, and Ohio, which have all become impossible or very difficult states for Republican presidential candidates. It is also something of a stretch to assume that he could carry his own home state, which is frankly the only reason to consider him for the nomination in the first place.
Florida is where he is known better than anywhere else and where he is supposedly well-liked. Nonetheless, most of the people there are not interested in backing his presidential bid, and that should tell us something. That tells us that there is much, much less to a Bush candidacy than meets the eye. While he may be the favorite of many donors and D.C. pundits, there is not much popular support for yet another Bush presidency, and even in Florida there is not much support for Jeb Bush’s pursuit of the presidency.
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