Glenn Thrush is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine. Alex Isenstadt is a reporter for Politico.

Jeb Bush, the man who would be front-runner, was as surprised as anybody when Donald Trump jumped into the 2016 presidential race in June. His instinctive first reaction was to hold his tongue, and his advisers agreed the best option was to keep his distance from an interloper who wanted to drag him into a reality-show shouting match.

Bush stayed strategically silent even when Trump delivered his infamous crack that some Mexican immigrants were “rapists.” It wasn’t easy, considering Bush speaks nearly flawless Spanish, backs comprehensive immigration reform and is married to the former Columba Garnica de Gallo of Leon, Mexico.


Like everyone else, Bush soon found Trump impossible to ignore. When Trump reposted a nasty tweet a couple of weeks after his contentious announcement speech—“Bush has to like Mexican illegals because of his wife”—the former Florida governor was forced to respond. “You can love your Mexican-American wife,” he told one interviewer before telling another that Trump was “preying on people’s fears.”

The half-dozen conservative senators and governors who had planned to run before Bush brought out his shock-and-awe fundraising campaign, had to laugh: They viewed Bush himself as an intruder, a political semi-retiree who sat on the sidelines for eight years while they fought Barack Obama. Now it was Bush’s turn to rage at an outsider.

“Seriously, what’s this guy’s problem?” he asked one party donor he ran into recently, according to accounts provided by several sources close to Bush—and he went on to describe the publicity-seeking real estate developer now surging in public polls far ahead of Bush and all the 15 others in the Republican field as “a buffoon,” “clown” and “asshole.”

***

Whatever Bush wants to call Trump, the most accurate appellation heading into Thursday night’s first big Republican debate of the chaotic 2016 contest in Cleveland is the label that should have been Bush’s: “front-runner.”

Bush may yet emerge as the party’s nominee, the third member of his family to claim the mantle, and his aides now claim Trump’s bloviating presence in a record-shattering field of 17 could be a blessing, allowing Bush to fly under the radar. But Trump’s rise has coincided with Bush’s awkward return to the national stage, and he has proven to be gaffe-prone on the trail. (Just this week he had to quickly walk back a statement that he wanted to defund “women’s health” programs, when he meant to say abortion services.) The party’s conservative primary voters remain lukewarm and, as importantly, he hasn’t scared rivals out of the race despite a massive $100 million-plus fundraising haul during his first few months in the race.

As much as anything, this is the story of 2016 so far. The proliferation of 17 candidates—a mob so big it needed to be subdivided into two separate debates—is a symptom of a deeper dynamic: the absence of a true front-runner capable of uniting the party.

“The plan isn’t working,” conservative writer James Tobin wrote in Commentary magazine of Bush’s de facto entrance into the race in January. “[O]ther Republicans appear to be insufficiently shocked and awed.”

Trump is besting Bush so far, but it’s hardly a lock that this is anything more than a summer fling. So far, The Donald has been immune from the backlash that typically kills mouth-driven campaigns—which is a good thing given his flip-flopping, amateur-hour staffing decisions; relentless you’re-a-loser negativity; and bad hair hidden under worse hats. But he shares a characteristic with all those lesser-known candidates who have also flooded into the 2016 race: He sees a vacuum at the top.

“You know, I thought about running in the past,” former New York Gov. George Pataki, the eighth candidate to announce his intention to run, told us. “I came close in 2012, but, to be perfectly honest, Mitt Romney had been running for six years. … It was pretty obvious that he had, if not a lock, a very, very strong hold on the Republican nomination.”

Open In New Window PHOTO GALLERY: 17 candidates, a couple of babies and a moose: The 2016 GOP race so far (click to view gallery)

Jeb Bush? Not so much. “This time, I believe that, when I look at the field, that I have the ability to win this election,” added Pataki—and this is a man struggling to capture a single percentage point in recent polls.

“There’s no clear front-runner,” says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a 2012 contender who briefly considered becoming Candidate 18 this spring before deciding the financial challenges were too great.

“There’s a vacuum in the party, and no one is filling it,” adds a veteran Republican operative who is backing Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, another candidate who sees Bush’s vulnerabilities but, like the others, has so far failed to capitalize on them. “That’s a recipe for chaos. Let’s see if anyone decides to flip the script Thursday and really go for it. I doubt it.”

In fact, Bush is still the best-funded candidate with the best organization and a focused, center-right message that seems best suited for a general election fight against the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. His showing in the polls is weaker than Mitt Romney’s four years ago (he’s in the 15 percent range in recent surveys at a time when Romney was touching 20 percent), but he has been inching higher recently, passing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to claim second place behind Trump.

Moreover, it’s hard to see what any candidate—even the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan—might have done to stem the fever to compete that has infected Republicans this year, given the party’s deep ideological divisions and the proliferation of rich party donors willing to bankroll the long-shot hopes of second- and even third-tier candidates. The difference between 2016 and previous years, in the words of another single-digit candidate who requested anonymity, is that the threshold question has gone from “Why should I run” to “Why the hell shouldn’t I” run?

Democrats, enjoying the spectacle are pushing the idea that the overcrowded GOP field has become a “clown car” with Trump at the wheel. The 40-odd Republican operatives, donors and campaign officials we interviewed for this assessment of where the race stands at this official kickoff point disagreed—but mostly about the metaphor, characterizing the contest instead as more of a runaway train, with a crowd of wannabes wrestling for control.

“The media narrative you guys are spinning isn’t specific enough—we have exactly one clown in the car,” says a top Republican official, referring to Trump. “So why did it explode?” the official added. “Because we have something in the Republican Party that the Democrats don’t have to deal with: a multibillion-dollar business in TV, political punditry and books and talk radio—we built up a ton of personalities, people that you guys in the media think are off the radar have been quietly gaining power. A whole slew of folks think they can, and should, run the party.”

It’s an important point that came through in nearly all our interviews: 2016 isn’t so much about Trump or Bush as it is about a crisis in the Republican Party, which hasn’t had powerful political leadership since the George W. Bush-Karl Rove machine crashed after dispatching John Kerry in 2004. Even Republican control of both houses of Congress since last year’s midterm elections hasn’t tamed the party’s internal feuding—Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker John Boehner can hardly control their own caucuses, never mind impose a code of conduct on unruly presidential hopefuls.

Behind the scenes, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, a canny operative from Wisconsin, and party elders like his predecessor Haley Barbour have tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to keep the crowded field from turning into a Trump-incited mob. After Trump’s people leaked news of the chairman’s gentle request that the “Apprentice” star play nicer with fellow Republicans, Priebus tried another tack, advising several other campaigns to ignore Trump’s more outrageous statements and to “not engage him” insult-for-insult, according to a Republican operative close to several campaigns.

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But it’s been largely in vain. At this point, Priebus is trying to work within the constraints of his position to minimize the damage inflicted on the eventual nominee, resting hopes on the efforts he’s overseen in recent years to shorten the primary calendar by a month—pushing back the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries, pushing up the convention from August to June. Most important of all, perhaps, he’s slashed the number of debates from 20 in 2012 to a maximum of nine in the 2016 cycle.

“I think part of our problem over the years is that we’ve been a candidate-crazy party,” he told Politico this week as he prepared to fly out to the Cleveland debate. “Hey, I can’t control everyone’s mouth. But I can control how long we have to kill each other.”

***

The 2016 GOP field would have been plenty crowded even if Bush and Trump had chosen to sit out. At least seven credible GOP candidates, a big but not outlandish field, were lining up well before Bush’s entrance was even considered a viable possibility: Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul; Govs. Walker, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana; and surgeon Ben Carson, a budding Fox News star, had all publicly flirted with the idea of running.

In mid-2014, well before any serious public discussion of him running, Bush had convened his core team—anchored by aide de camp Sally Bradshaw and longtime strategist Mike Murphy—to game out a run; they initially focused on a candidate not on the official might-run list, a mirror-image Republican they believed posed a truly existential threat to their boss—Mitt Romney.

Sure enough, by late 2014, Romney was telling his old donors that he was mulling another run despite two consecutive losses. Over the Christmas holidays, Bush and Romney began furiously working the phones in a genteel shadow war to secure commitments from the party’s money elite. Bush fared a lot better, kicking off a fundraising blitz that would eventually power him to a record-shattering $100-plus million super PAC haul.

The power play worked, and Romney officially bowed out in late January, after a polite, largely uneventful chat with Bush at a Utah resort in early January and a little hardball—hiring away the man who would have been Romney’s top operative in Iowa. As a passive-aggressive parting shot, the 2012 nominee declared he believed he could have beaten anybody, including Bush, in the primary.

The Bush camp was enormously relieved, perhaps a little too relieved. They were also worried—but noticeably less so—about the other probable candidates. Most worrisome was Rubio, a loquacious fellow Floridian two decades younger than Bush, who had been planning a run for years. It’s not clear whether the Bush camp made any overtures to Rubio (neither side would comment), but Bush’s team embarked on a campaign—a smaller version of their Romney strategy—to secure commitments from the same donors Rubio was courting, and they played hardball with local elected officials, making it clear fence-sitting would be regarded as a betrayal, according to a person close to Bush.

The tactic succeeded in draining support from Rubio, who has struggled to break out of mid-single digits nationally, but it didn’t knock him out of the race. “I think that was a big deal,” said a top adviser to another candidate. “If he had been able to clear Marco, that would have been a serious power move.”

With Romney out and Rubio in, the Bush team focused on building a mean political machine. They bought up blue-chip staff and set the candidate on a 60-event fundraising tour for his pet Super PAC, Right to Rise. The candidate, they said, would delay his kickoff announcement until the late spring so that Bush could legally appear at the PAC’s events to solicit million-dollar contributions.

Mike Murphy, the California-based consultant who runs the PAC, told Politico the idea was never to “get people out of the race but to build the best operation in the business." The team’s strategy “remains the same: avoid distractions, win more contests, and win the most delegates,” he wrote in an email.

But current and former Bush aides say there was little doubt the campaign wanted to project power and toughness. Bradshaw, Bush’s most trusted aide, made a blunt pitch to potential donors and staffers: You want to be with the winner, guys.

“Late in 2014, you started seeing an attitude—sign up here now or you are out forever,” said a veteran aide with deep ties to the Bush camp. “They were successful with the inside game, they hit all their internal targets. Sally’s very convincing. But, to a certain degree, they were drinking their own Kool-Aid. Have we really done anything to redefine the guy as a candidate? The other guys, especially Trump, have succeeded in defining us as the big, bad establishment.”

Bush took a swipe at that criticism in his announcement speech in Miami two months ago. “I know that there are good people running for president. Quite a few, in fact,” he said. “And not a one of us deserves the job by right of résumé, party, seniority, family or family narrative. It’s nobody’s turn.”

But his effort to define himself as a man of the future—fit to put the party’s pieces back together—has thus far fallen short. He hasn’t been a terrible candidate—his capacity to speak fluent Spanish has been a huge asset, and his June 15 announcement speech earned high marks from almost all his opponents, including one Clinton operative who called it “the best announcement anyone did.” But he has been maddeningly inconsistent, capable of tone-deaf pronouncements like when he appeared to dismiss concerns about economic growth by saying “people need to work longer hours” and a week’s worth of inartful dodges when asked about his brother’s invasion of Iraq.

Walker was among the first to directly challenge Bush, delivering in Iowa a fiery, fight-till-the-end speech of the type the Republican base loves the same week in January that Bush was clearing out Romney. The comment that attracted the greatest attention was Walker’s claim that pro-union zealots threatened “to gut my wife like a deer”—but Bush’s people paid attention when he announced he would win without running a “shock and awe” campaign.

Walker has raised tens of millions less than Bush but remains a close third in national polls and maintains a lead in recent Iowa caucus polls. “This is the first real presidential race on the Republican side in years where it wasn’t anybody’s turn,” John Jordan, a prominent Walker donor from California wine country, told Politico.

Equally unbowed was Ted Cruz, whose steadfast opposition to his own congressional leadership after insisting on the 2013 government shutdown gave him access to big anti-government donors outside the standard circles of political power. Unlike Walker, he could count on mustering enough financial firepower to take on Bush directly, amassing close to $50 million in combined contributions to his super PACs and campaign.

Still, they had long been expected to run. It was only this spring when the politics shifted, and quickly. Soon, unlikely candidates began sprouting up like dandelions on Bush’s lawn.

First, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, the Iowa caucus winners in 2008 and 2012, respectively, jumped in, hoping to grab conservatives turned off by Bush’s establishment image. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose much-heralded 2012 candidacy bombed, and Christie, who had been seen as a top contender until scandals erupted at home, also both decided to run anyway, wanting to prove they still possessed the skills that had made them stars in the first place, according to people close to them.

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The newbies kept on coming. Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina—filling an obvious void for a party struggling for traction with female voters—announced. So did Sen. Lindsey Graham, a sharp-tongued South Carolina Republican not previously regarded as a White House wannabe and who is now running the closest thing the field has to a single-issue candidacy as the pro-military counterpoint to the stay-at-home libertarianism of Rand Paul. Pataki and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore couldn’t resist, either; each seemed bored with semi-retirement and drawn to the show as a way, no matter how improbably, to reestablish their presence on the national stage.

But the most interesting late entrant, and the one with the greatest potential to inflict damage on Bush, didn’t emerge until a few months after the field started taking shape: Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a highly regarded if notoriously cantankerous sitting swing-state governor whose résumé is as impressive as Bush’s—sans the mixed-blessing surname.

Kasich did not seriously begin to consider joining the race until late spring, when he became convinced, aides said, that there was a lane for an establishment-minded governor of a large, purple state. At around that time, he directed his aides to reach out to his major donors—some of them were already flirting with Bush—with a pitch that emphasized the centrality of his state. A glossy brochure handed out to prospective supporters hammered home that point: "No Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio. Ever."

Kasich had for months toyed with the idea of running, and finally sprang into action when he saw how much Bush was struggling. “He hasn’t caught fire, and that’s why there’s so many people running,” said John Weaver, Kasich’s chief strategist and former top aide to John McCain—arguing that for the first time in over half a century the party lacked a prohibitive favorite for the nomination.

Then came the unlikeliest, least welcome and most irksome candidate of them all: Trump, who attacked a blah campaign with a real estate developer’s instinct for pouncing on a vacant lot in a high-tone neighborhood at just the right moment. He had no doubts as to which candidate he should be gunning for. “I’m not a fan of Jeb Bush,” he sneered at a rambling press availability in South Carolina last month. “Jeb Bush is in favor of Common Core and he is weak on immigration. … Who would you rather have negotiating with China—Trump or Jeb?’

***

This is not exactly what the Republican Party establishment had in mind four years ago, in the soul-searching aftermath of Romney’s humbling loss to Obama.

Back then, Reince Priebus commissioned an RNC task force—which included Bush lieutenant Sally Bradshaw—to envision a smarter party that didn’t devour its own, one that steered clear of anti-Latino rhetoric, sidestepped the culture wars to attract younger voters and ceded less power to billionaire-piloted super PACs dumping vanity ads on tuned-out voters. And if they couldn’t create party harmony, the task force decided, at least the GOP should rip the Band-Aid off as quickly as possible.

“It is better for the party to have a nominee selected earlier in the 2016 cycle rather than later,” the authors wrote, more out of hope than expectation.

That’s precisely the point too often missed with all the handwringing over the clown car: It’s not the size of the field that worries Republicans, it’s the length of the contest that it portends, the prospect of a bitter battle that drags into the June convention with a winner emerging too damaged to beat the Democrats in November.

Priebus continues to hope the party, like a self-cleaning oven, will quickly burn off superfluous candidacies: “We’ll have a nominee by March,” he told us.

And there’s some evidence, on the eve of debate one, that the winnowing has begun: Rick Santorum’s campaign is running out of cash; Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham and George Pataki have no organizations to speak of, and will be little more than spectators if they can’t catch fire. Even Rand Paul, a serious candidate with deep support in the libertarian wing of the party, is struggling with serious fundraising and managerial challenges.

But the Trump maelstrom has obscured all of this; and besides, even if The Donald decamps tomorrow, Bush won’t be the automatic winner: there remains a tough core of seasoned candidates who have has less money than Bush but an equally legitimate claim they represent a substantial bloc of a divided party.

“You don’t know whether this is going to be a meat grinder year, in which case the guy with the biggest bucks probably has a substantial advantage,” notes Gingrich. “[Or] is this going to be a news media populist uprising year, in which case there are at least five or six guys who could take advantage of that?”

There are plenty who are hoping that’s the case, and just as many scenarios for how it might play out. Ted Cruz, who has languished in the mid-single digits in early polling, has taken the most unusual course: praising Trump rather than blasting him, no doubt looking to pick up Trump-ites if the developer’s campaign collapses. “Donald spoke out, and then this parade of Republicans ran out to smack him with a stick, one after the other after the other,” he told an audience in Iowa recently. “The only one that didn’t was me.”

Marco Rubio, for his part, has been laying low, waiting to inject himself into the race late in anticipation of a Bush swoon, when he will likely position himself as a mainstream alternative to his fellow Floridian—only more conservative. Third-place Scott Walker is chugging along, selling himself as a blue-collar fighter with the inside track on Iowa—and it’s still fair to bet that winning there would give him instant front-runner status, regardless of the national polls.

There are a handful of other wild cards—Ben Carson has maintained his high-single-digits support and shows few signs of exiting the race, Chris Christie has a Trump-like capacity to grab attention at a debate, and John Kasich went from 0 to 4 percent quickly enough to snag the last spot on the 10-man stage in Cleveland.

But the true Republican wild card remains John Ellis Bush, who has suffered all of the slings and arrows of a front-runner without yet earning the pole position. The watchword in Jebworld is “stable”—his poll numbers are pretty good and will get a lot better once Mike Murphy starts dropping million-dollar ad buys in the fall and winter. But then again, Bush’s aides have long admitted that he can’t win the nomination without winning at least one of the first four contests, and right now he’s currently second to Trump in New Hampshire and South Carolina, while trailing badly in the less hospitable conservative caucus states of Iowa and Nevada.

And here’s where the 2012 experience of nominee Mitt Romney (the one candidate so far successfully trumped by Bush this year) offers a cautionary tale: A protracted primary fight that exposes the party’s many divisions, and one that devalues the Republican brand, could be fatal.

“I think it hurt us a lot,” says Stuart Stevens, Romney’s senior political strategist—referring to a tortuous 2012 GOP primary season that dragged on until the end of May. “And I think it could be worse this time. You are going to have more money, with more super PACs keeping candidates alive. … There’s a real possibility that you can have a different person win each of the first four contests—and that really is the ‘Hunger Games’ scenario.”

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