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Political Calculus

Jeb Bush and the Base: Persona Trumps Policies

Jeb Bush’s announcement that he would “actively explore” a 2016 presidential run has been met with healthy skepticism, in no small part because he has staked out positions at odds with the Republican Party’s conservative base.

Mr. Bush’s positions on immigration and education are certainly challenges, but probably overrated ones. Tone and message, not the specifics of his policy agenda, will probably determine whether he can strike the balance necessary to appeal to the party’s donors without losing too much ground among staunch conservatives.

This is not to say that Mr. Bush, a former Florida governor, is close to being in touch with the conservative base on immigration reform and education policy. Both issues are probably potent enough to hurt his chances. But he is no iconoclast, not even by the standards of recent Republican nominees, who have overcome greater heresies.

John McCain won the Republican nomination in 2008 by running as a “maverick.” In the years before his campaign, he co-sponsored an immigration reform bill and a plan to regulate carbon emissions. He bashed “extremists on the right” in a previous presidential race.

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Jeb Bush's positions on immigration and education won't endear him to the Republican Party's conservative base, but those concerns may be overrated.Credit...Susan Walsh/Associated Press

Four years later, Mitt Romney won the nomination even though he had enacted a health care plan that served as the model for the Affordable Care Act. He had supported a long list of liberal positions in his various runs for statewide office in Massachusetts. Heading into this year’s contest, Chris Christie, another rival for the support of mainline, establishment-friendly Republicans, has committed equal or perhaps graver blasphemies on gun control and immigration.

Mr. Bush may indeed struggle to win Iowa, which leads the Republican nomination process. But he could seriously compete there, unlike Mr. McCain in 2008. The Iowa caucuses are dominated by evangelical voters more than Tea Party voters. They select cultural conservatives, like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. Mr. Bush has solid credentials on cultural issues, so there’s no reason to dismiss his chances there at the outset, even if he’s unlikely to be the candidate of religious activists. Even Mr. Romney, a Mormon who once supported abortion rights, came within 35 votes of winning the Iowa caucuses in 2012.

The real challenge for Mr. Bush is negotiating the competing pressures of the so-called invisible primaries and the actual ones. The invisible primary is the competition for the support of party officials and donors with the influence and money necessary to propel a candidate toward the party’s nomination. A candidate who wins the invisible primary decisively almost always goes on to win the nomination.

Mr. Bush’s biggest asset is the extent to which he seems to appeal to the fairly moderate business-oriented and mainline officials and donors who have outsize influence in the invisible primary. My colleague Nicholas Confessore reported that Mr. Bush was among three candidates whom donors might try to unify behind in the initial stages of the primary. Mr. Bush’s early foray into the field on Tuesday may be an attempt to prevent those donors from consolidating around a different candidate, or even a pre-emptive show of strength to dissuade another candidate, like Mr. Romney, from running to win the same donors.

The catch, of course, is that the source of Mr. Bush’s appeal among the Republican donor class is a message and tone that often seems close to attacking conservatives as ideologues. Mr. Bush suggested that Ronald Reagan would “have a hard time” in today’s Republican Party, and said the party sounded as if it didn’t allow for disagreement among its members. A candidate can get away with a couple of moderate positions; it’s a lot harder to run against the party’s base, like Jon Huntsman in 2012.

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Jeb Bush stood behind George W. Bush as their father acknowledged defeat in a 1970 U.S. Senate race in Texas.Credit...Sam C. Pierson Jr./The Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press

It would be one thing if Mr. Bush’s push against the base were heard only at dinner parties on the Upper East Side or in Alexandria, Va., or if Mr. Bush were planning to move a bit toward the right during the primary season. But it doesn’t seem as if either will be true. Another colleague, Jonathan Martin, wrote last week that Mr. Bush didn’t want to alter his “persona to satisfy his party’s hard-liners” if he runs.

This “persona,” perhaps along with his association with his brother’s often activist view of government, is probably creating a bigger problem for Mr. Bush on his right flank than one might guess based on his policies alone.

A Monmouth University poll, published on Tuesday, showed that Mr. Bush held a tepid 39 percent favorability rating among Tea Party supporters, with 38 percent unfavorable — worse than any other major potential nominee except for Chris Christie. He held a better though hardly impressive plus-15 rating among non-Tea Party Republicans. Similarly, a McClatchy/Marist poll showed Mr. Bush with just 8 percent of the vote among Tea Party supporters, enough for fifth place, compared with 21 percent among non-Tea Party supporters (among whom he led).

Mr. Bush could still win even if Tea Party supporters opposed him by a wide margin. Mr. Romney managed to steer down the same narrow path to victory in 2012. It’s a path that starts by consolidating the establishment wing of the party in the invisible primary. It ends by winning a protracted fight against an underfunded conservative opponent who can’t break through in the delegate-rich blue states that are often needed to win the party’s nomination, even though the party struggles to win them in presidential elections.

It is an arduous path to victory. But candidates with the favor of the establishment have won nearly every recent nominating contest for a reason: It brings big advantages. And the Republican establishment doesn’t appear to have too many other choices. If top G.O.P. donors are indeed choosing between Mr. Bush, Mr. Christie and Mr. Romney, they might not have a better option than Mr. Bush.

But Mr. Bush is not a particularly strong candidate either. He may have friends in the donor class, but he hasn’t run for office in a decade, and he enters with no base of support among the G.O.P. primary electorate. He may not be lucky enough to face an opponent as flawed as Mr. Santorum or Mr. Huckabee. This year’s Republican candidates have the potential to be far stronger than in recent cycles, and if one builds momentum, the establishment’s early, anointed pick might not be able to stop him.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Jeb Bush and the Base: Persona Trumps Policies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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