Jeb's South Carolina firewall fails to take shape His reservoir of support is neither as wide nor as deep as he might have hoped.

GREENVILLE, S.C.— Twice before, South Carolina has delivered for the Bush family. In 1988, it famously served as George H.W. Bush’s firewall after he finished third in Iowa. Twelve years later, it served the same role for George W. Bush after John McCain’s New Hampshire victory.

But as Jeb Bush seeks to become the third in his family to win here, he’s finding the state almost unrecognizable. The electorate in the first primary state in the South is more conservative than before — and the former Florida governor is perceived as a moderate. Much of the old Bush team has defected to other candidates. And the presence of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is eating into Bush’s natural base of support.

While Jeb Bush — who made his first trip to the state last week as an all-but-announced candidate for the presidency — is undeniably the beneficiary of the goodwill generated by past family campaigns, more than two dozen interviews on the ground show that the reservoir of support is neither as wide nor as deep as he might have hoped.

“There’s going to be some resistance to a Bush III here,” said Fred Payne, a member of the Greenville County Council who backed George W. 15 years ago and is now uncommitted.

“Jeb’s a good guy,” added Payne, 74, who came to hear Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker speak at a barbecue organized by the state GOP Thursday night. “He’s got a great family name, but I really think America is ready for a fresh name. We’ve got such a great stable of candidates.”

That stable is part of Bush’s problem. While nearly everyone agrees that the 2016 field is currently wide open, the buzz at the grass roots is about neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (who has been spending a lot of time here) and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul — but not Bush. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum each came to the state last Saturday for a national security conference outside Columbia.

Below the radar, Santorum has spent considerable time on the ground since finishing third, with 17 percent, in the 2012 primary. He has two kids enrolled at The Citadel in Charleston, and his brother lives on nearby Kiawah Island. On Thursday, he announced that Jon Parker will run his South Carolina operation. Parker advised three winning statewide candidates in the Palmetto State, including the attorney general, the state treasurer and the superintendent of education.

When it comes to the strategists who guided Bush here in 1988 and 2000, it’s clear the Bush band is not getting back together — key players have signed on with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Warren Tompkins, a top South Carolina strategist on both the 1988 and 2000 Bush campaigns, will run Rubio’s super PAC. And his former business partner, Terry Sullivan, will manage Rubio’s national campaign. Heath Thompson, Bush’s South Carolina state director in 2000, will produce the senator’s TV ads.

Bush, meanwhile, has not yet signed a big-time consultant to lead his South Carolina operation.

It’s a far cry from the firewall structure that Lee Atwater designed here for Bush’s father in 1988 — and that survived to save his brother’s presidential hopes in 2000.

Atwater, a sharp-elbowed political prodigy, helped engineer a decisive win for Ronald Reagan over former Texas Gov. John Connally in 1980, and then, as manager of George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, helped arrange for South Carolina to move its primary up to the Saturday before Super Tuesday, the day when 17 states would vote.

Atwater was confident — and correct — that his powerful friends could deliver the state and thus create momentum for Bush going into Super Tuesday. He was rewarded with the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, though he died of brain cancer in 1991. His allies stuck together for “W” in 2000, and South Carolina was rewarded with attention from the new president — and with ambassadorships for key supporters.

If all of that seems a distant memory, it’s at least in part because Graham, the state’s senior senator, has complicated the primary dynamics this time around.

In December, the day before announcing on Facebook that he was seriously exploring a 2016 run, Jeb Bush delivered a commencement address at the University of South Carolina. Eddie Floyd, a local surgeon who was a top fundraiser for the two previous Bush campaigns, helped coordinate that speech. But he’s now backing Graham and said it will be hard for Bush to win with the state’s own senator running.

“I’m going to stick with [Graham] as long as he stays in it,” Floyd said by phone from his medical practice in Florence. “He’s got a tremendous amount of support in South Carolina.”

David Wilkins, the former speaker of the state House who served as ambassador to Canada during Bush’s second term, is also with Graham. He said he has “great respect and love for the Bush family” but he’s solidly behind the favorite son.

“I don’t know that everyone supporting Lindsey Graham would [otherwise] support Jeb Bush, but there are a lot of us,” he said. “You’ve got to wait and see whether Lindsey pursues this all the way or not.”

Rival campaigns don’t believe Graham will follow through with his candidacy, so they’re operating as if he’s a nonfactor. Their thinking is that he’s mainly interested in injecting foreign policy into the debate. And while he can raise enough money to be a credible candidate, he would not want to risk the humiliation of losing in his home state.

Graham’s advisers concede that carrying the state in a presidential context would by no means be a slam dunk — he won the GOP primary for a third term last June with just 56 percent, hardly a sign of strength.

The shape of the field, though, isn’t Bush’s only challenge.

From 1980 to 2008, the winner of the state’s GOP primary went on to win the nomination. It was a favorite talking point of locals: unlike Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina picks presidents. But, in 2012, Newt Gingrich trounced Mitt Romney by 12 percentage points, a defeat that served to prolong the nominating battle and underscore the rise of a state GOP electorate that has become less focused on electability and more concerned about ideological purity, especially in the tea party era.

Don Rogers, who is active in the Greenville Tea Party, predicts Bush will “fade away.” He backed George W. Bush in 2000 and voted for Gingrich in 2012. He currently supports Walker.

“Forget Jeb Bush,” said Rogers, 76. “He’ll never have the base. So, by definition, he’s a loser.”

“He scares me to death,” Rogers added. “The most frightening thing in politics is moderates. You don’t know what they’re going to do.”

Bush’s message on his first trip to South Carolina was all about ending partisan gridlock. “The center has to be rebuilt,” he said in Greenville.

He faced tough lines of questioning about his strong support for Common Core education standards and legal status for undocumented immigrants.

Rachel Pertile, a physician in Columbia who backed Mitt Romney in the 2012 primary, said electability matters a lot to her. But she’s worried about Bush’s position on immigration. “My No. 1 problem with him right now is the whole amnesty thing,” she said, adding that her husband, a radiologist, legally immigrated and others should too.

At Walker’s debut event in Greenville, Kelly Rowe, a conservative Upstate activist who home-schools her seven kids, said opposition to abortion in all cases is her primary voting issue. The mother of seven volunteered for Santorum in 2012, but she and her husband remain uncommitted.

Asked about Bush, she said “he’s not far enough over” to the right. “He’s not going to make himself different from the Democrat candidate,” she said. “We did that before with Romney.”

“We need to make sure he’s running for the right reasons,” her husband, Jeff, 44, added.