I swear it was there just yesterday.
Jeb!'s campaign had been trying to infuse his dismal candidacy with a ray of hope that's suddenly gone dark. Eli Stokols
has the details:
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. [...]
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.
Oops! Now Jeb! is in serious trouble. Really the very last straw he can grab onto is his hefty war chest, but a bad showing for the third fundraising quarter, which ends tomorrow, could be his undoing. One Bush donor put the panic level at a "6 or 7" on a scale from one to 10. And Bush loyalists are
fretting as Marco Rubio soaks up more of Scott Walker's donors than Jeb!
“People are looking at the stage and saying: ‘Jeb and Marco? I’m going with the new,’ ” said a top party fundraiser not aligned with a campaign. “You’re seeing people really gravitate to [Rubio] and saying, ‘Okay, we’ll buck the Bush machine.’
“What I hear everywhere when you say Jeb’s name is, ‘If you want to lose the general election, nominate Jeb,’ ” the fundraiser added.