Just 100 days before the first nominating contest, Jeb Bush — who was once seen as a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination — is downsizing his Miami headquarters to save $1 million a month, cutting payroll by 40 percent and slashing 45 percent of the campaign budget.
Despite these drastic cutbacks and Bush's plummeting poll numbers, his campaign is still trying to cast the downsizing as a positive move made from a "position of strength." "This is about winning the race," a Bush adviser told Bloomberg. "We're doing it now and making the shifts with confidence. We expect to win."
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Analysts and rival campaigns will view the changes as a desperate act, perhaps the last one, of a man whose campaign has dropped in the polls in recent months and has remained mired in the middle of a crowded field despite a month-long blitz of friendly television ads. None of the changes deal directly with what even many of Bush's supporters say is his main challenge: The burden of trying to convince voters hungry for change to choose a man whose father and brother both served as president. [Bloomberg]
The latest national poll by Monmouth University released Tuesday showed Bush polling in sixth place with just 5 percent support — a 10-point drop from his lead in July.