In a must-read interview, Sasha Issenberg gets Right to Rise PAC’s Mike Murphy to talk more than any strategist really should. After some jawing and joshing about the Donald Trump phenomenon, Murphy machetes into the jungle of delegate math, and he explains how losing the early states need not keep Jeb Bush from the nomination.
“We only have 10 pure winner-take-all states now,” Murphy insists. “The Republican Party, we used to be the Social Darwinists: second place got you a Greyhound ticket to Palookaville. Now we’re proportional, mostly by congressional district. From Feb. 1 to March 15, we have a bunch of big states; Ohio, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina probably.”
Issenberg pushes back on Murphy a bit, and gets this remarkable exchange:
MURPHY: March 15 is the big day. On the 16th, I don’t think anybody will have a mathematical lock, but there definitely will be a very strong leading candidate.
ISSENBERG: You're describing a scenario where a candidate who has never finished higher than third or fourth in any particular state could still be the leading candidate on March 16?
MURPHY: Right.
ISSENBERG: Is that a problem from a media momentum perspective that if you’re not actually winning stuff and getting the coverage that comes along with being a winner?
MURPHY: It would choke out a lot of little guys.
Now, it’s technically true that the quartet of early primary states don’t offer many delegates. When I followed Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) around Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, that was one of his unspoken arguments: Alaska offered more than twice as many delegates as tiny New Hampshire. When I followed Ron Paul’s campaign in 2012, his team (including some former advisers now on trial) insisted that they were notching up delegate wins while a shiny-object-obsessed media focused on who got the most people to say a candidate’s name at non-binding caucuses.
The sages of Twitter have compared Murphy’s strategy to the one that failed Rudy Giuliani in 2008, but it looks a lot more like the one that failed Ron Paul.
Here’s the problem: That argument makes less sense for Jeb Bush than it made for Ron Paul. Start with the fact that his key outside strategist is now explaining away possible losses in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Bush’s father and brother both won South Carolina. Bush’s father won New Hampshire. His brother lost that state — to a campaign run by Mike Murphy. The idea of the Republican Party’s dynasty blowing those states is more shocking than Murphy lets on, not least because Jeb Bush himself said “you can take it to the bank” that he’ll win South Carolina.
Okay, go further, and note that the pooh-poohing of the first four states comes two months after Right to Rise started spamming their voters with mailers, and more than a month after it began running New Hampshire TV ads. In the Real Clear Politics average of New Hampshire polls, Jeb is running fifth behind Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio. He has not merely benefitted (or “benefitted”) from more paid media than them; he has spent 22 days in the state, more than Trump (14 days), Carson (10 days) or Rubio (13 days).
There’s one more problem with the theory, and it’s that the RNC reacted to Ron Paul’s grass-roots campaigns by binding delegate selection to the results of early caucuses. But Bush’s problems run deeper than that. The assumption that he can tank in February, tank in the South-heavy Super Tuesday “SEC Primary,” then claw back into contention with the “big day” of March 15 is based on nothing but Bush’s diminishing cash advantage.
Certainly, it’s not based on his appeal as a candidate. In Florida, the state now tasked with bailing him out, a University of North Florida poll has Bush at 9 percent, good enough for fourth place, and with far lower favorable numbers than Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Only the persistent, sunk-cost media narrative that someone named Bush should be a front-runner is obscuring the truth. It’s hard to see how his campaign survives until the Florida primary.
David Weigel is a national political correspondent covering the 2016 election and ideological movements.
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