Jeb Bush super PAC adviser dubs 2016's election the 'stupidest campaign in the world'

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published 9 June 2016

Former Jeb Bush super PAC adviser Mike Murphy has a simple explanation for why the former Florida governor didn't survive in the 2016 presidential election: He just simply wasn't cut out for today's "Kardashian World."

"When Trump said low energy, what he was really saying was too polite, too civil, too many big words. Jeb's not built for the stupidest campaign in the world," Murphy, the longtime GOP adviser behind the Right to Rise PAC, told CNBC's John Harwood in an interview published Thursday.

Murphy said that because Bush's style would normally be a good fit for a general election candidate, it took the campaign a while to wake up to the "nightmare" that nobody actually wanted a "smart guy who wants to run an accretive campaign with nongrievance politics." Looking back, Murphy said he wishes he would've been more aggressive in organizing attacks on Trump, who he said "has fascist tendencies." "If I go back in a time machine," Murphy said, "maybe one of the arguments I would have made, and I think the other campaigns would have passed on it was, 'We have a systemic threat with Trump here. I'll match all you guys.'"