JEB!, 2016's Gay-Friendly Republican

BUSH-PORTMAN 2016!
Jeff Gannon for White House Communications Director

(Buzzfeed) - Quietly, Jeb has filled his campaign-in-waiting with some of the most open proponents of gay rights in the Republican Party. And donors think he sees the issues the same way they do — pro-LGBT.

Shortly after the 2012 election ended, David Kochel, the top-flight Iowa Republican strategist who had run Mitt Romney’s campaign in the state, decided to stop keeping his opinion of marriage equality to himself. He had spent years helping presidential candidates court the conservative Christian voters who dominated Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, but he had grown increasingly convinced that his party was on the wrong side of the marriage debate, both morally and politically.

With the campaign over, Kochel — who declined to comment for this story — began turning up at gatherings for pro-gay Republicans, calling on the GOP to modernize its social agenda, and appearing on local TV talk shows, demanding to know why the party of “freedom and liberty” shouldn’t support marriage rights. “Frankly,” he told one interviewer, “the culture wars are kind of over, and Republicans largely lost.”

According to people who discussed it with him at the time, Kochel was suffering from post-2012 burnout, and joked that he had taken on this little mission because he was tired of caucus politics, and wanted to ensure that he wouldn’t get sucked back into another race in 2016. After all, what kind of Republican presidential candidate would want to hire an outspoken marriage equality advocate as a campaign strategist?

As it turned out, Jeb Bush would. Read more.