Anxiety

Bush camp moves to ease donor angst

Assessing the state of anxiety on a scale of one to 10, one donor puts the panic level at a 'six or seven.'

By Eli Stokols

For the past week, Jeb Bush's campaign advisers have been using a new data point to convince nervous donors that he's still the candidate to beat — Bush's lead in the political prediction markets.

Just one problem: Beginning Sunday night, PredictIt, the biggest of the online sites and the one referenced last week by top Bush advisers and confidants, placed Marco Rubio ahead of Bush at the head of the GOP pack.

The sudden evaporation of yet another data point in his favor explains the tension in and around Bush's campaign this week on the eve of the third quarter FEC fundraising deadline.

His top bundlers, summoned to Miami for a last-minute call-a-thon, are working hard to convince increasingly anxious donors of their candidate's strength. Bush's team is highlighting the benefits of its sizable financial advantage — mainly, a top-notch national organization — in an effort to focus attention on the campaign's durability but also to demonstrate its superiority in relation to Marco Rubio, whose rise in recent polls represents a growing threat.

Miami's message essentially boils down to this: Keep calm and remember we’re sitting on $100 million and an extensive organization.

“Our campaign has the scale to go through all the early states and into March and have the organization to get us on the ballot, to go get delegates and acquire delegates throughout the process,” said David Kochel, who oversees the campaign’s early state strategy.

With polls showing Bush stuck around 7 percent — and trailing the three outsiders as well as Rubio — the political prediction markets until this week seemed to offer the campaign justification for its optimism. Al Cardenas, a Bush confidante, went so far as to note the wisdom of the markets in a recent email to Bush supporters, pointing to then-odds that showed Bush with a 34 percent chance of winning the GOP nomination, ahead of Rubio at 26 percent.

But after two debates, the perception that Rubio is a stronger communicator has taken hold and is affecting fundraising at the quarter's end, according to sources in both camps.

“I don’t know if it’s panic or paranoia in Miami, but they are losing Walker people to Marco and if you say what’s true, they get mad,” said one Bush donor, who spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity. “I think it’s just reflective of what’s been going on for the past month or so and the way the race, at least in the establishment lane, has shifted. It’s really Jeb or Marco now. Marco’s fundraising has picked up and Jeb’s has stayed flat.”

Another Bush donor invited to Miami, assessing the state of anxiety within Bush's operation on a scale of 1 to 10, put the panic level at a “6 or 7.”

“This is one space that Jeb has owned,” he said, speaking of the campaign's fundraising. “You can’t give up your position of strength if you need to build momentum in other places.”

The roiling political environment has only complicated the fundraising push: the staying power of Donald Trump, which surprises and scares the GOP establishment, and the tenuous situation on Capitol Hill following the resignation of Speaker John Boehner in the face of a strong anti-establishment revolt.

"There's a lot concern that if the conservative wing of our party takes control, that no Republican [presidential candidate] has a chance; so a lot of folks are waiting to see what happens with a shutdown," said Fred Zeidman, a Bush bundler who spent Monday making fundraising calls from his office in Houston and admitted that it's something of a slog. "Things could definitely be better. The low hanging fruit has all been picked."

The campaign’s fundraising machine has been working overtime in recent months, having to squeeze harder to get hard money, limited to just $2,700 per contribution, out of a donor list that already pumped $103 million into Bush’s super PAC during the first half of the year.

Bush's operation, which continues to rely on family political ties dating back decades, is rolling out the big guns. Former President George W. Bush hosted two fundraising events for his brother in Texas last week and has three more scheduled over the next month. He and former President George H.W. Bush, despite his fragile health, are scheduled to visit with bundlers at an event in Houston next month as a reward for those who lock up $50,000 in new contributions.

“There’s less money out there than people realize,” said Katie Packer Gage, who served as Mitt Romney’s deputy campaign manager in 2012 and whose firm is doing work for Rubio in Michigan. “Lots of donors are holding their money because if the big donor wants anything, they want to be with a winner; and they want the right candidate.”

Bush’s team remains convinced its deep war chest, and the organizational advantage it affords, will prove decisive — and that’s a big part of the case they’re making to donors.

As Donald Trump dominates the airwaves and outsider candidates like Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina surge past Bush in the polls, Bush's operation continues to stick to the game plan by churning out policy papers and sticking to the mechanics of running for president -- such as collecting signatures for ballot access.

He has 40 people on the ground in the first four states on the primary calendar and is working to make the ballot in all 50 states ahead of what increasingly looks like a long slog of a nomination fight where every delegate could matter.

"I think we're in a very strong position to be successful in February,” Kochel said. “And you're going to need to have success in February to get through March.”

As major donors like Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer sit back and ponder the question of whether Bush or Rubio is better equipped to vanquish Donald Trump or Ted Cruz once the race narrows, Bush's team views their campaign’s unrivaled organizational depth as an underestimated — and overlooked — asset.

"Are some people nervous? Of course. Some people are always nervous,” one of Bush’s biggest donors, also speaking anonymously, said. “And things don't look really good right now. But most of Bush World are pros. They know there's time. Now if the election were tomorrow, we'd be s--tting bricks. But the election isn't tomorrow. We have time. And we have the experience on our side. No one has the campaign, the infrastructure that Jeb has. And no one has the money.”

Bush’s financial advantage is a big part of why he is still widely considered a likely finalist in the sprawling primary battle, despite a series of minor gaffes on the campaign trail and low wattage performances in the GOP debates.

“For Scott Walker, we saw how when you run for president, there's no safety net,” said Ron Kaufman, a Bush supporter in Massachusetts who advised Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. “So once you start going south, you go south. The advantage Jeb has is he's got a safety net.”

That safety net, of course, may not be there forever. Beyond the symbolic importance of posting a solid third quarter fundraising number, Bush has another set of expectations to meet to convince donors he's still the candidate best-suited for a marathon campaign -- the efficacy of his super PAC's first $25 million in television ads set to run out next month.

“If this $25 million doesn’t move numbers, in two weeks, that’s when you’re going to see panic set in,” a donor said.