There's Work Ahead if Bush Does Run; He's at 14% in a Fragmented GOP Field
(Susan Walsh, File / AP Photo)
Jeb Bush has his work cut out for him, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds - but no more than any of the other potential Republican presidential hopefuls for 2016.
Fourteen percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are registered to vote support Bush for the GOP presidential nomination. In a matchup assuming that Mitt Romney doesn't run, that puts Bush numerically first, but not by a meaningful margin. Paul Ryan has 11 percent support, Rand Paul 10 percent, and six others have 7 or 8 percent apiece.
See PDF with full results and charts here.
Having 14 percent support means that 86 percent of leaned Republicans aren't Bush backers. Still, he has major name recognition, and some advantages in his support profile.
(ABC News)
Chief is the fact that he does better among mainline Republicans, who are most apt to participate in primaries. Bush has 19 percent support in this group (compared to Ryan's 14 percent). Among GOP-leaning independents, by contrast, Bush's support declines to 9 percent. Paul has 15 percent among those independents; Christie, 10 percent.
Bush, a former Florida governor, announced today that he will "actively explore the possibility" of running for president, and will form a political action committee for that purpose next month.
Bush may have challenges in the strongly conservative wing of the party; his support ranges from 18 to 15 to 12 percent among moderate, somewhat conservative and very conservative leaned Republicans, respectively. On either side of him among very conservatives are Ted Cruz, with 14 percent support, and Scott Walker, with 10 percent.
If Romney were to run again, the poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, finds that Bush would slip to the next tier: When included in the mix, Romney has 21 percent support, vs. 10 percent for Bush, 9 percent for Paul and 8 percent for Ryan.
One open question is the potential impact of Bush's family history; his father lasted a single term and his brother had the most unpopular second term of any president in modern polling. In an ABC/Post poll in late October, 52 percent of registered voters said they did not think Jeb Bush would make a good president, compared with 43 percent who said the same about Hillary Clinton.
Clinton has led Bush in a range of head-to-head matchups this year. But these are early days, the Democrats took a drubbing in the November midterms, and it's an uncertain world entirely.
METHODOLOGY - This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by telephone Dec. 11-14, 2014, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 410 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are registered to vote, including landline and cell-phone-only respondents. Results have a margin of sampling error of 5.5 points, including design effect.
The survey was produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates of New York, N.Y., with sampling, data collection and tabulation by Abt-SRBI of New York, N.Y.