Jeb Bush?

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

But is Jeb’s race over before it begins? He would be running, after all, to lead a party he seems to disdain, a party that has become so fragmented and pulled to the right that it would rather lose the election than be led by someone as moderate as Jeb Bush. Even W. is considered a liberal in today’s fire-breathing G.O.P.

“I do think we’ve lost our way,” Jeb said in an interview on stage with a Fox News reporter, urging Republicans to move out of Crazy Town: “We need to elect candidates that have a vision that is bigger and broader, and candidates that are organized around winning the election, not making a point.” [...]

Jeb thinks Republicans have lost their way. He may soon learn that a lot of conservatives think they have found their way — and it’s not the joyful, loving, government-can-be-a-force-for-good way. It’s the mean, cruel, gut-the-government way.

-- Maureen Dowd at The New York Times

Comments

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

There is to a point, sure. But it's also worth putting them against the actual electorate. It's why the whole "Reagan wouldn't be conservative enough for the Tea Party/JFK would be a Republican" mentality isn't sensible. It's why saying "I wish the Republicans were more like Eisenhower" is tone deaf.

As for getting at the ideology of the electorate, I'm not sure how we would do that except to survey most likely voters with a battery of questions on the conservative-liberal scale.

It's been done (http://falcon.arts.cornell.edu/pe52/EnnsKoch_SPPQ.pdf). It's not surprising that the Republicans have moved rightward (even if the people they're electing generally have not until very recently), it's more surprising that the Democrats have still got the institutional advantage they do.