Jeb! Bush's donors are pointing fingers before he's had the chance to lose even one primary

Jeb! Bush’s big donors seem to have reached the anger stage of grief over their candidate’s limp campaign, and they have a scapegoat: Mike Murphy, the head of Bush’s Right to Rise Super PAC. The charges include that Murphy wasted money on hilariously ineffective positive ads about Bush (probably not so hilarious to the donors), that he’s wasted money on a host of other useless if smaller-scale projects, and that attacking Marco Rubio at this stage of the game is a bad idea, because hey, maybe he could be the one to do what Jeb! can’t and beat Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

“It looks like they’re blowing the whole thing up, like even if Jeb can’t win, they’re not going to let anyone else win either,” said a Florida Bush backer and Right to Rise donor who worked on Bush’s gubernatorial campaigns and in his administration. “You might as well light all of this money on fire. Most of all, they’re hurting the reputation of a really great man.” 

POLITICO interviewed nearly two dozen Right to Rise donors and Bush supporters, and all blamed Murphy for a super PAC strategy that has failed to boost their struggling candidate. Multiple advisers to the Right to Rise super PAC concede privately that the $40 million spent on positive ads aimed at telling Bush’s story has yielded no tangible dividends.

Among the many and varied complaints, several Republicans close to the Bush campaign have questioned the PAC’s decision to let John Kasich own the airwaves in New Hampshire this fall, allowing the Ohio governor to get a foothold in a state where Bush must perform well to keep his White House bid alive. Others faulted Right to Rise for spending so much money on telling Bush’s story and not changing tactics immediately after Donald Trump entered the race and began stoking the groundswell of anti-establishment sentiment and defined Bush — lastingly — as “low energy.”

Let’s be honest, though: Jeb! deserves co-credit for defining himself as low energy. Not to mention that he does also have a campaign as well as a Super PAC—at least in theory. His campaign would seem to deserve some of the blame, don’t you think?

Then again, given the amount of money Bush raised early on and the scale of the expectations for his candidacy, there’s plenty of blame to go around, and plenty of angry donors to spread it.