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By Steven Espinosa , Senior When I look back and think about the 2016 race so far, I realize that there were actually some things that I, as well as many Republicans with at least some sense of reality, appreciated about Jeb Bush’s campaign. Let’s be clear: I still think it was the most unprepared, awkward, tacky, and cringe-worthy campaign on either side of the aisle this season, primarily because “Jeb!’s” absence from politics in the past eight years caused him to miss out from key movements that shape today’s Republican Party, especially the Tea Party Movement. However, now that he’s gone, I realize that his campaign was the best at denouncing Donald Trump’s dangerous xenophobic rhetoric and explaining what a real conservative solution to the problems faced by everyday Americans looks like.
But it’s clear that none of this matters to the base of the Grand Old Party in 2016. Jeb’s loss is a serious case of “it’s not you, it’s me”: It’s not him that’s the problem, but it’s the electorate that has drifted further and further to the right. The three serious contenders in the race right now--Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz--are all anti-establishment, anti-immigration, radical conservatives that want to seriously shake up the way that Washington is run. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush couldn’t run from his last name, and his moderate stance on issues like immigration only made him look weak. As a result, he was forced to drop out because he relied on a pre-Obama GOP base, which in today’s polls seems to have only made up about 6% of the electorate. With Jeb Bush’s departure from the 2016 primaries as a turning point for the identity of the Republican Party, the GOP is officially in shambles--it is dead, and the media is feeding on its remains. With Donald Trump winning the past three GOP primaries and Ted Cruz winning the first caucus back in Iowa, the Republican Party is going to have to answer real questions about what it stands for as it goes into the general election. Are they still serious about deporting 11 million men, women, and children? Is “foreign policy” going to be synonymous with “carpet bombing”? And most importantly for them, how will they build a coalition of minority voters, which they acknowledge is necessary for winning the general election come November? Even though my outlook for the future of American politics is already grim--which sucks terribly, because I’m only 18 and this is my first election year--there is also some hope in all of this madness. Maybe the most important part of Jeb Bush’s departure on Saturday is how it showed that big money in politics doesn’t necessarily correlate with buying elections, a major theme that is found in both Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns for president. As this interesting New York Times article outlines, Jeb Bush had raised $130 million from all sorts of special interests and donations, and spent it all on a variety of costs, including positive advertising ($84 million) and political consultants ($10 million). This sum of money is far more than any of the other candidates running for the Republican nomination right now, but it clearly made little to no impact on Jeb Bush’s campaign. Maybe this foreshadows a day when the massive corporate influence in U.S. elections might just come to an end.
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