Jeb Bush's attempt to stabilize his tailspinning presidential campaign began Monday in a Tampa auditorium with a retooled stump speech and an unlikely pitch to Florida voters: Remember me?

The moves to shore up a once taken-for-granted home base has left Florida GOP insiders in disbelief — their formerly sure-footed governor is fighting for relevancy on turf he’s supposed to own. It’s a sign, they say, of how far he’s fallen in the presidential pecking order. He’s trailing badly in polls of critical early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire; he’s mired in single digits in national polls; he’s polling way behind Donald Trump in Florida; and he’s racing to stem anxiety of donors. Another depressing statistic: Only 46 percent of the Republicans who voted for Bush in his 2002 reelection are on the rolls.


“To be blunt, a whole lot of people who voted for Jeb are dead,” said Alex Patton, a Florida Republican strategist. “Even though Jeb was a great conservative governor, there’s a whole lot of people who know or remember nothing about it.”

Thus, Bush’s comeback tour kicked off with a speech heavy on nostalgia for his eight years as governor, which ended in 2007. And it doubles as a book tour, promoting Bush’s new tome “Reply All,” based on decade-old email correspondences with aides and constituents during his time at the Florida governor’s mansion. At the event, Bush regaled a receptive crowd with the minutiae of his tenure, from helping an elderly woman get a raccoon out of her attic to his 2,500 line-item vetoes of the Florida budget.

Monday’s event, the first of three Florida stops billed as the launch of his “Jeb Can Fix It” campaign tour, was crammed with rosy reminiscing about the Bush era in Florida. Supporters were led in a call-and-response chant describing different parts of the state as “Jeb Country.” Attorney General Pam Bondi fondly recalled her days as a prosecutor during Bush’s governorship, and she remembered his leadership “in the eye of a hurricane,” a reference to Bush’s much-touted stewardship of the state through natural disasters.





Quickly, #JebCanFixIt started trending on Twitter, but not necessarily in a good way. Memes started popping up, mocking the slogan, accompanied by tweets such as "BREAKING! @JebBush quits #GOP race, signs deal with @hgtv for new reality show: #JebCanFixIt!" and "The 2000 US Presidential election. #JebCanFixIt"

Even beyond the unfortunate side effects of the slogan, some Florida Republicans say his new pitch is a tough one to sell.

“The Bush campaign is trying to sell something that the electorate doesn’t want to buy: nostalgia,” said Randy Nielsen, a Republican political consultant who favors Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. “There’s a melancholy feeling among Republicans like us who have been on this journey with him for years, and now this is happening. It’s like the pitcher you loved as a kid and you’re watching him pitch in his last baseball game.”

Another Florida GOP consultant said the new tome was like reading "Sally’s scrapbook of memories," a reference to longtime Bush confidante and strategist Sally Bradshaw.

The former Florida governor's campaign no longer has its front-runner swagger, but Florida is must-win turf, since his time atop the state is the entire rationale for his candidacy, operatives say. It's also critical to the electoral math. Florida has one of the largest pools of Republican delegates in the country, at 99, and will award all of them to the winner of its March 15 primary. Bush and Rubio are competing aggressively to win that huge haul, but polls so far give the lead to Trump.

In yet another example of Bush’s predicament, Florida newcomer and second-place GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson (who recently moved to West Palm Beach) had about 1,500 people show up at a book-signing in Pensacola while Bush’s campaign had less than a third of that crowd in Tampa — a far more populous area.

It’s a far cry from his time in office, when Bush, one of the most influential governors in the state’s history, built the Republican Party there into a powerhouse and looked politically invincible.

The Bush campaign dismissed the suggestion that his tour represents a reintroduction to Florida voters or a change in strategy.

“Today was launching his e-book, ‘Reply All,’ which tells the story of his conservative leadership in Florida; it made sense to do a swing through the state highlighting those accomplishments,” said spokesman Tim Miller, noting that Bush will be continuing his tour in early presidential nominating states. “Think you are overthinking it on the electoral play in Florida.”

Bush’s heavily biographical tack, which revolves around what advisers call “the Florida story,” appears to directly contradict the advice that one current Bush ally, Mike Murphy, gave in 2012 to the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

“Biography no longer seems to matter much in American politics,” Murphy, who now heads the pro-Bush super PAC Right to Rise, wrote in Time magazine’s April 23, 2012, edition. “In the frenetic buzzing of today’s politics, the personal story has become easy prey to a million tiny bites. … If Romney bets only on biography as his economic message, this is going to be a short race. Presidential elections always tilt forward, not backward.”

A big part of Bush’s problem: There’s Bush fatigue — even at home in Florida.

Nielsen has conducted two large Florida polls over the past two months, and both have shown Bush trailing badly in the crowded GOP field. The most recent survey by Nielsen’s polling firm, Viewpoint Florida, interviewed more than 2,000 likely Republican voters — who favor Trump the most (27 percent), followed by Rubio (16 percent), Carson (15 percent), Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (12.4 percent) and then Bush, who gets 12.1 percent and is essentially tied with Cruz. The poll’s error margin of error is 2.2 percentage points.

“I’m very surprised by what’s happened,” said Jamie Miller, who was executive director of the Republican Party of Florida in 2003, when Bush was governor, but is neutral in the 2016 race. “Those of us who know Jeb Bush and who worked with him were expecting a superprofessional campaign and a superprofessional candidate. And to date, we’ve gotten neither. I just can’t figure out what’s wrong.”