Why JEB! might lose

Note: this article discusses why the Crown Prince might lose the GOP nomination, not the general election.  It is pretty much a given that JEB! would lose the general election if he manages to buy the nomination.

(Times of Oman) - ...I wouldn't fool myself with the notion that Jeb's biggest problem in the primary season is his policy positions. His stances on immigration and Common Core will hurt him with conservatives, and his record in Florida will help him, but his biggest problem right now is identification, not ideology. 

There just aren't that many Republican voters who want to vote for a dynastic heir in 2016, and it isn't clear yet if they'll decide that they ought to vote for Bush in spite of that reluctance.

Voting for president is a political act, but it's also a relational one. As the presidency increasingly dominates our politics, people want a nominee who will somehow personally represent all the virtues that they associate with their country, their political coalition and their worldview. They want an archetype, an inspiration, a figure who can somehow personify liberalism, or conservatism, or America itself.

Among Republican voters, everything that's appealing about a figure like Ben Carson — or, in a different way, Sarah Palin before him — is explained by this desire.

Voters are more responsible than polling swings sometimes suggest. They know that in the end they ought to support someone who actually has a chance of being elected president and effectively governing the country. 

And when the tension between "want" and "ought" can't be resolved as neatly as it was by Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the vintage Barack Obama in 2008, the side of "ought" almost always wins.

That's why there hasn't been a real no-hope nominee in either party since George McGovern in 1972. That's why Mitt Romney, unloved and unwanted, was still the Republican pick in 2012. And that's why if Jeb could just run against, say, Carson, Huckabee and Cruz, it wouldn't matter that voters don't want to be represented by another scion of the Bush dynasty. 

In the end, they wouldn't really have a choice.

But right now, in Walker and Marco Rubio, Bush faces two opponents whose backgrounds and identities — the working-class slayer of unions, the self-made immigrant's son — match the way Republican voters want to think about their party in a way that a silver-spoon politician, whatever his record, never will. 

And notwithstanding Walker's recent stumbles, neither he nor Rubio obviously fails the "ought" test, since it's possible to imagine either man doing better than Bush against Hillary Clinton in a general election. Read more.