Donald Trump as GOP Nominee? Not a Chance, Says Head of Jeb Bush’s Super PAC

Jeb Bush, the man who wants to be our nation’s third President Bush, has already taken some hits his team didn’t see coming this campaign season—but one very important member of his camp claims he’s only getting revved up.

According to Mike Murphy, the man in charge of Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise USA, it’s still early days, and despite what the polls (not to mention Trump) may suggest, a good deal can still happen in Bush’s favor between now and the 2016 election. For his part, Murphy intends to see to it that it does.

As he told Bloomberg Politics’ Sasha Issenberg, there’s a rhythm to presidential races that doesn’t ultimately have so much to do with pundits and polls:

What I find is we’re in this funny casino of the pre-season now where the complete sum of pundit knowledge in this race, with a few rare exceptions, is based on national polling that in my view is completely meaningless. Every debate, for a week I hear, “This is the most important debate of the campaign,” until the next debate. And there are going to be 11 of them. Every poll is the most important, everything is do-or-die. And while that hyperventilating analysis has some impact in the donor world—witness the Walker campaign—our strategy is to actually peak on the voter’s timetable. And so we always make sure we want to get our theory of the race out there so people understand how we see it. We don’t even do national polling, we’ve done one national poll in our whole history here. We think it’s a total waste.

Murphy was also blunt when it comes to a certain showy GOP front-runner, calling Trump a “false zombie front-runner” and “totally unelectable.” Really?

“He’s dead politically, he’ll never be president of the United States, ever,” Murphy declared.

A considerable swath of the American public hopes he’s right—at least when it comes to Trump’s prospects. Meanwhile, Bush still has some ground to recover, but Murphy, as befits his job description, continues to talk a big game about his boss: “I know he builds slowly and gets better and better.”

—Posted by Kasia Anderson

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