A.G. Gancarski
Watching the Sunday talk shows, if I didn’t “know” that Jeb Bush was considered washed up, I would have thought the other campaigns saw him as a real force in Tuesday’s balloting.
On ABC’s “This Week,” both Donald Trump and Marco Rubio laid into Jeb. Trump countered Bush scoring points on him in a Saturday night debate exchange on eminent domain. Rubio, meanwhile, felt the need to get to the right of Bush on abortions during “crisis pregnancy” scenarios.
Bush has been left for dead by pundits in recent weeks and months. The seeming front runner status he enjoyed early in 2015 a memory, it’s almost as if there has been a re-calibration and now the pundits underrate him.
We’ve seen the stories about donors waiting for the green light to jump ship from his campaign. The conventional wisdom is that they would, perhaps, move to Rubio, heir apparent to the establishment line.
A funny thing happened at Saint Anselm College, though. The big losers of Saturday’s New Hampshire debate were Rubio, nailed by Chris Christie for his repeated recitations of his 25 second anti-Obama speech. And Trump, whose only play was attacking the booing crowd.
So the question is as we round the corner to the nation’s first primary: Who benefits?
A Politico piece Monday morning touted a poll done by a John Kasich Super PAC that showed Rubio “plummeting” to just 10 percent.
The poll has Kasich running second, 2 points ahead of Jeb Bush.
Yet the Sunday morning counter messaging didn’t address Kasich at all.
On this end, we don’t see all the internal polling. Campaigns and PACs present what contributes to their narratives.
What we do see, instead: the fruits of the other campaign’s efforts. And clearly, they worry about Bush.
With that in mind, how does an outside observer define success on Tuesday night for Bush?
A second-place finish? Probably at least.
But how close does it have to be?
In 1992, there were parallels to 2016. New Hampshire was worried about the effects of NAFTA and the death of mills and factories then.
Now? Apprehension about issues faced by the children of those displaced workers, which are perhaps best crystallized in the repeated references on the campaign trail to the heroin epidemic.
More Republican candidates than not have worked in stories about these issues, with Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, and Bush messaging about the ravages of addiction in their own ways.
The GOP field of 2016, like the Democratic field of 24 years ago, had a lot of volatility. Every poll, then and now, comes with a caveat. No poll right now has Jeb closer than 20 points out.
What if, however, Bush comes within 10? Could he give the Comeback Kid speech, using talking points like “this has been a tough campaign, but at least I’ve proved I can take a punch.”
Back in 1992, 45 percent of Democratic voters decided in the few days before the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. This suggests that in a field full of options, and in the open primary set up, there is real volatility… and chance for a second tier candidate to become first tier quickly.
