What do you think the chances are that Jeb Bush will actually win the Republican nomination?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I give him a 50/50 chance because of the Bush Crime family and his $$$$
I agree. I would have put him higher before he said his brother would be his foreign policy adviser. Unless he’s going to get W’s advice, then do the opposite!
Still important factors. The Bush family inside game savvy and experience, plus the money. Most times they can overcome gaffes, even major ones, which this is.
And the fact that no Bush has lost an intraparty contest in modern times since Poppy was bested by Reagan.
That said, I have to slightly discount Jebbie’s chances because of his stupid brother’s Iraq War and Jeb’s stupid answer. I would have thought he’d thought this out carefully before deciding to announce his (exploratory) run.
Even would have thought he would have gone to his idiot brother privately, months ago, and worked out a way to acknowledge brotherly loyalty while at the same time giving himself better political positioning on the issue. Something like: George, I’m going to tell u what I really feel about it in private, but in public if I say that I’ll be finished, so I need your blessing to show some independence.
Because it’s only May, I’ll just reduce his chances from 60% to 50%. Still the frontrunner but the margin between him and Bruce Walker (30%) has diminished.
Concur.
The radical conservative base doesn’t like him, but they don’t fund the winners. If Bush gets a couple of primary wins behind him early, he’ll take it in a walk. But if the crazies coalesce behind a fire-breather, game on!
but, something is clear
the smartest Bush is Barbara.
“Look at all those beautiful white people.” Not so smart.
It’s all relative.
I see Barbara Bush as a Lady Macbeth figure.
Sorry, but the smartest Bush was Barney.
Zero. The wingnuts won’t vote for him on account of the little brown ones, and he’s unelectable in the general erection due to the taint of Chimpoleon, Emperor of Mesopotamia — a stench in which he is only managing to dowse himself more and more. The big bucks boys know that so they’ll steer clear. Where is his constituency?
I wasn’t sure, up until the Iraq-tastrophe Fox fumble.
People have noted the he might be a little rusty. The fact that he was not able to answer the most obvious questions about the war his brother started tells me that he is worse than rusty. Questions that he was GUARANTEED to be asked. He should have been able to know this out of the park, because he should have seen it from a mile away. He is out of it. And this Happened on Fox News, which adds to the how in the world did he let this happen factor.
And the whole thing got started because he considers his Bro his go-to adviser on the Middle East and SAID it with his mouth in front of actual living humans who have ears. Very bad week. It’s not that he is the Smart One – it is that he thinks he is the Smart One.
A few more like this and it’s over. He’s already skipping Iowa.
Remember though, we’re just starting the first quarter of action. A few costly turnovers for sure. But games and elections aren’t decided in the first quarter.
If he’s still stumbling and bumbling about Iraq in the fall, then it could be fatal.
Just wait until they all start slicing into him at those republican debates.
Rand Paul especially has the potential to make Iraq a serious problem for anyone named Bush.
20%. As bad as his week with Iraq fumbles has been, I’m inclined to think by the time Cruz has had his way with him on the debates, this will look like Jeb’s best week. His fumbles will grow, he will embarrass Poppy and further tarnish GW.
The fact that he and his handlers allowed him to even hear question from a hostile college student at this early point shows a lot. The fact that he doesn’t. In his body and soul know what his right answer to the Iraq question shows remarkable unpreparedness, lack of savvy, little appreciation for the historical significance of that blunder and perhaps overly developed sense of destiny that he’d be president.
Or maybe he doesn’t really want the job but feels he has to run.
I’d put his chances at less the 15%
Does it really matter?
10%. Walker would have to implode first.
I see Walker as most likely also. He’ll beat HRC, too. It would be a 2000 photo finish all over with Jeb (maybe including SCOTUS) but Walker will beat HRC handily.
Which states does Obama carry, and HRC not carry?
Maybe:
Walker carries: Wisconsin
Kasich carries: Ohio
Neither carries both.
Better question: What states did Romney carry that HRC could flip (not necessarily with any coattails)?
Arkansas, West Virginia, North Carolina and lock down Florida.
Add Illinois. This is not Hillary country despite her birth.
It’s been solidly Dem for president going back a number of cycles, usually a margin in the double digits.
Even if Hillary hadn’t grown up in IL, she would/will carry the state by a comfortable margin. Is there something negative going on there about Hillary I’ve missed? Other than Rahm Emanuel, I can’t think of one. And he’s almost as much in the Obama camp as the Hillary one.
IL goes to the Dem, not even close to being as tossup as I see it. And if it could plausibly be considered even a tossup, then my party’s chances in 2016 are just about nil.
Republican Senator filling Obama’s seat. Republican Governor. Republican Comptroller. Only Chicago is Democrat. That’s the elephant in the room, of course, but Rahm is really poisoning the brand.
A Red Illinois would signal a worse-than-Dukakis blow out.
Na ga happen.
Hope you are right.
I can’t tell if you are being serious. No way in hell is Walker getting elected. He’s the only one in the race with a worse physical appearance than Cruz. And sad as that is, it is what it is.
Good point. But I hear people admiring him all the time. All about how he lowered taxes by throwing “loafers” off the rolls. This plays real big outside of Chicago. And I blame it on Democrats playing footsie with business giving all sorts of tax breaks and burdening working people with regressive sales taxes (highest in the country, I believe), now taxing out of state sales and HUGE property taxes, dwarfed only by New Jersey. The Republicans blame this on the needs of the welfare state, never mentioning how, for example, Sears has NEVER paid property tax and has their headquarters in a special school district that has no children!
I’ll be the contrarian and suggest 80% chance. His gaffes this week will be forgotten by the time of the NH primary. I don’t know what’s going in with his campaign–too tense, too uptight?–but he ran pretty smooth campaigns for Florida governor.
I expect he will follow the same track as Mitt Romney–the GOP primaries will be another series of musical chairs leaving one candidate standing. The attrition rate will be constant as most of Jeb’s bizzarro competition say bizzarro things and / or never get above a microscopic number of votes and get virtually no delegates.
Like Mitt, Jeb will be hated by the base but get nominated anyway, he’ll have tepid support at the convention, and when he loses, he will be blamed for running a bad campaign. And the GOP base will learned nothing and I expect rinse and repeat for 2020.
I concur.
Ordinarily I’d invoke Nixon’s Law — nomination goes to the best hater — but in this day of the super-Pac, it’s not enough.
The nomination process is more like an IPO than anything nowadays.
Good analysis, but I’d still put his chances down at 40%.
He’ll have the funds to stick it out through the winnowing months. As the field narrows, GOP primary voters tend to begin voting based on perceived electability. Barring further ginormous gaffes, and barring entry by Kasich, the press will regard Bush and Walker as the “electable” ones. They will think of Jeb as boring. They will flack for Walker shamelessly.
Bush didn’t destroy the economy of Florida while Governor. What lifts Bush’s chances above 20% is the fact that, sooner or later, despite the press, the hideous declines Walker has imposed on the Badger State will seep into public knowledge.
I think he will be the Rudy Guiliani of 2016, lots of money but few voters.
I would put the percentage of his chances of winning the nomination somewhere in the mid-teens. And most of that is simply due to his access to cash.
As much as Reince Priebus would like us to think otherwise, the GOP primary this time is going to be off-the-charts crazy. It is going to be a churning cauldron full of every type of vile zombie that we thought this country had put down a long time ago. It will truly be a completely fact-free zone, rife with every paranoid delusion of the right wing world, whose synapses need constant tickling in order to maintain the outrage.
Which brings us back to Jeb. Putting his whole Iraq debacle aside, I simply cannot imagine Jeb being able to keep up with the crazy that would be standing on those stages with him. Much like what happened at times to Romney, he will either be forced to parrot things that in his heart he does not truly believe, or he will be run out the door by the crazy bug-eyed people carrying the torches and pitchforks. But should he somehow prevail over all these challenges, he will likely be so scarred and, having had to say things to appeal to the most lizard-brained among his party, will be painted in a corner on positions that the general population finds quite reprehensible and unattractive. For his sake, the most beneficial thing for him might be an early exit. Because what we are about to experience in the season of the GOP is going to make Sarah Palin look like a genius.
Well, crazy if The Donald actually throws his toupee into the ring. A real circus.
But actually if the clowns are limited to Ben Carson, Prof Perry and maybe one other whose name escapes me, the absolute crazies will be far outnumbered by a large number of non-stupid but merely RW, fiercely conservative and establishment conservatives.
Carly Fiorina is not in the Bachmann or Palin category of nitwit. Walker, Kasich, and Lindsay Graham aren’t extremists’ extremists and are well-spoken and slick. Overall, despite this week, Jeb is not his dumber brother George. Rubio is probably slick enough to hold his own and not embarrass himself, for a while. The smartest of them all, Theodore Cruz, is articulate and capable of scoring points against the frontrunners in debate.
Maybe one of the stronger GOP fields in recent memory, in terms of intelligence (not counting scientific and moral matters) and articulateness.
I’d say chances are next to nil, which st this point in the GOP primary actually means it’s almost guaranteed. All the others just have to implode first, and then Jeb’ll step in as the establishment candidate. If the GOP could get the evangelical base out to vote for a Mormon in ‘012 (and they did), then there’s really nothing objectionable about Jeb that can’t be surmounted by next year.
The correct answer is 5%.
The 2016 GOP nominee will be….(drum roll please)…Marco Rubio. And he’ll win the general. President Rubio. And he will make conservatives out of millions of Hispanic voters.
The fact that he’s an idiot is, if anything, a plus. It helped Reagan a ton that he didn’t understand complexity and couldn’t see the world as it was. (Ketchup not, for example, being a portion of vegetables). So with Rubio: he sees himself as a messianic figure. He’s just the earnest, smiling fascist the US has been waiting for.
I am beginning to reconsider Rubio’s chances for the nomination. He doesn’t have the dour disposition of the others and is a fresh face. He’s a lightweight, however. He changes his positions on the issues as soon as they become inconvenient. Immigration, wisdom of invading Iraq, etc. Some say his experience compares with Obama’s before his candidacy, but he lacks – to a very large degree – Obama’s intellectual strengths and general gravitas. I don’t think he matches well against HRC.
Russ Feingold for Senate!
I’m with Talking Points Memo on this. Not only is it a whopper series of gaffes, nobody’s sticking up for him on the Republican side. Several are even attacking. That means the Republicans have given up on him. He’s toast.
I’d give him a 25% chance. The more likely nominee is Walker, and I’ve been saying that Walker would be the nominee even before the primary really got started because he’s just crazy enough for the mouth-breathers but just sane enough for the not-entirely-crazy. Also, his signature issue is union-busting, which guarantees lots and lots of corporate cash to compete with Jeb.
I thought that Jeb would be dead just because 1) he’s much too friendly with brown people; and 2) Bush fatigue. But to that we can now add 3) inept campaigner.
So why am I giving him even a 25% chance?? Because aside from Walker, the GOP field in 2016 is, once again, a giant clown car. He could become the nominee just the way Romney did: by being the last one left standing. That would require a Walker implosion, which there is some finite chance of occurring, especially since Walker is as much of a foreign policy ignoramus as Jeb. So if Jeb can hang on by his fingernails (a la McCain in 2008), Walker is liable to say something equally outrageous and let Jeb back into it. So, he has a genuine chance. But not a large one. I’m assuming his campaign won’t be this bad going forward, because… well, I mean, the guy has had an actual political career…
Practically Zero. I will admit, his chances are better than Carson’s, but not by that much.
The only chance he has is the Romney route: Keep plugging along while the Klown Kar Kavalcade burns itself out. But in 2012 Romney was the ONLY sane candidate still standing after NH. I don’t think Kashich and Walker are going to bow out. They are in competition with exactly the same voters as Bush.
The Fundie Xtians don’t trust him. The Nativists don’t like his wife or his kids. Teahadists don’t trust anyone named Bush. Hispanics are not politically naïve enough to actually believe that he would favor them in a crunch.
There’s no THERE there.
Your “serious” question:
A more important question:
What do you thinkare the chances that a dedicated, thoroughly trusted ally of the PermaGov will actually win the presidency?
Bush, Clinton, some other trusty…it all depends on the way the practicalities of the fix work out over the next months.The controllers will choose two as the most saleable and then sell them like crazy…if of course the old fix mechanisms are still strongly enough in place to work. Print media? TV? Now being engulfed…and quite possibly being made irrelevant…by the digital revolution. Will Google, Facebook etc be the new set of tools? A new tool is always risky until it has been completely mastered.
We shall see, soon enough.
Won’t we.
AG
70%.
For all the hue and cry about what the base wants, in the end the GOP always nominates the establishment guy: Romney, McCain, Dole, two Bushes. Scott Walker isn’t enough of a candidate to buck the hierarchy.
One of the memorable moments in the last nomination was the Romney media carpet-bombing of Gingrich in Florida; yikes. He must have spent half his whole budget there but it seemed to work. The money.