Saturday, May 09, 2015

Bush Has A Problem With The Far Right Of His Party


Let me warn you up front that this is not a poll of the whole Republican Party. It is a survey done by a Super-PAC -- the Game Changer PAC. This PAC is mainly composed of people on the far right -- ultra-conservative Republicans, Libertarians, and "small government" independents -- basically the people that felt comfortable in the teabagger movement.

They surveyed their supporters (2,226 of them) during the month of April of this year. And the chart above shows one of the more interesting results of that survey. Those results reflect which nominee would cause those on the far right to sit out the 2016 election, and not vote. The biggest loser in this was Jeb Bush, who about 60% of those surveyed said they would not vote if he got the GOP nomination.

This does not mean Bush won't get the nomination. He's still one of the leaders. But it does indicate that he has a serious problem with the ultra-right in his own party. This poses a dilemma for Bush. The Republicans can't afford for any of their voters to stay home in November 2016. I doubt if 60% will actually stay home, since these are pretty politically-active people -- but if only half that percentage followed thru and didn't vote it could hurt the GOP.

What will Bush do? Will he move even further to the right to please the far right (who make a substantial part of the Republicans that will be voting in the primaries) and lost moderate Independents in the general election -- or will he stand firm and hope he can bring enough establishment Republicans to his cause to win the nomination (betting that Walker, Christie, and Rubio don't take too many of them)? It will be interesting to see what he does.

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