JEB STILL A FACTOR? – AT 11:25 A.M. ET:   Jeb Bush, to paraphrase an old watch commercial, takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'.  But is he still a factor?  From The Politico: 

Jeb Bush didn’t fix it. His attempted attacks on rivals have fallen flat. His $30 million in TV ads have failed to move his numbers. And now, with the Iowa caucuses less than two months away, he’s polling at a miserable 3 percent nationally.

But there’s one significant success that is keeping his campaign alive: Jeb Bush has convinced major GOP donors and supporters that the polls are wrong.

“I am like the Israelites following Moses, and I am not the only one,” said Mike Fernandez, the top donor to Bush’s super PAC, after a new CNN poll showed Bush an astounding 33 points behind the poll leader. “Unfortunately, it might not be that many of us.”

While rival campaigns boast that some Bush backers are making side bets on other candidates, hardly any Bush donors have publicly abandoned him — largely out of unwavering loyalty to an incomparable Republican dynasty and to a candidate many put on a pedestal in spite of his political shortcomings.

“Given the poll numbers currently, you would think there would be these massive defections from a campaign like this,” said Slater Bayliss, a Florida-based GOP operative and longtime Bush ally. “And the reason there haven’t been is Jeb Bush; because people believe he’s in it for the long haul and believe he’s a serious candidate — even in a cycle where serious doesn’t seem to be selling. They like him because he’s serious. Eventually, they think serious will sell.”

Outside the steady-under-fire nature of Bush’s top-level donors, he has kept his campaign together because of the true-believer nature of campaign manager Danny Diaz and longtime adviser Sally Bradshaw. Both are expert in making regular, data-filled pitches of proprietary campaign research that put worried donors at relative ease.

The two, along with longtime Bush aide and South Carolina director Brett Doster, will make yet another presentation to top donors on Saturday in Miami. Their bottom-line message is unchanged: National polls aren’t predictive of primary success and the campaign’s organizational efforts will bear fruit. More privately, Bush’s team says there’s still time to engineer an unlikely comeback.

COMMENT:  I admire Bush's stamina, but I just don't think this is his year.  Obviously, that is speculation.  He's a serious man with a fine record as governor of Florida, and he reminds us that there are Republicans running who've actually governed.  It is a very strange year.  The nominations are nine months away.

December 5, 2015