Former Republican Governor of Florida Jeb Bush has been gone from politics for a long time and it shows in his less than inspiring social media penetration.
After Jeb Bush announced plans to release over 250,000 emails from his time as Florida’s governor, it became obvious he was taking a serious stab at 2016. Serious enough to try to specifically warn off two embattled Republican governors and right wing heroes who can’t afford such transparency: Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Chris Christie of New Jersey. Get out of the way, conservative favorites. Jeb Bush is in the house.
Mitt Romney was reported to feel that Jeb Bush was totally beatable and isn’t the heir apparent to the GOP 2016 establishment throne. And Romney might actually have a point, if Jeb Bush’s social media penetration fails are any indication of the level of his grassroots support from Republicans.
Zeke Miller, a political reporter for TIME, noted that Jeb Bush’s recent Facebook post bombed:
Jeb Bush’s post was an announcement that he’s establishing a leadership PAC – aka, the first step in running for President in 2016 (talk about burying the lede, he has this a few paragraphs in, clearly not an expert at social media yet):
We also talked about the future of our nation. As a result of these conversations and thoughtful consideration of the kind of strong leadership I think America needs, I have decided to actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States.
In January, I also plan to establish a Leadership PAC that will help me facilitate conversations with citizens across America to discuss the most critical challenges facing our exceptional nation. The PAC’s purpose will be to support leaders, ideas and policies that will expand opportunity and prosperity for all Americans.
In the coming months, I hope to visit with many of you and have a conversation about restoring the promise of America.
It’s been up for three hours as of this writing and has 2,800 likes. When/if Hillary Clinton announces that she’s establishing a leadership PAC, it will have this many likes in minutes. If Sarah Palin did it, she’d have a lot more likes than Jeb Bush does. It comes down to grassroots support versus establishment picks.
To put this in perspective for those who are thinking 2,800 sounds like a great numbers, a ten hour old post on sort of irrelevant Sarah Palin’s Facebook page has 24,447 likes. President Obama’s weekly address post on his Facebook page has 100,662 likes, though it was posted on December 13 and the posts pushing healthcare deadlines have less than Jeb Bush’s post– but healthcare deadlines aren’t exactly Facebook hot and they certainly aren’t apples to apples regarding an announcement of this size.
Mitt Romney doesn’t post a lot; his last post is dated November 27 and it has 151,660 likes as of this writing. Rand Paul is popular, with 1.8 million general likes and 8,356 likes on a post from Monday, one day old. Ted Cruz has 1 million general followers, but he shared a TV appearance of his four hours ago that is a bigger fail than Jeb Bush’s FB share, with only 377 likes, but when he’s fighting imaginary amnesty, he gets a lot of Facebook love.
Chris Moody, senior correspondent for CNN politics, points out that Jeb’s Twitter penetration isn’t much better:
Hillary Rodham Clinton has 2.53M followers on Twitter and she’s only tweeted 115 tweets.
Jeb Bush better get on it if he intends to push Romney out of the primary light. On Sunday, supporters of Mitt Romney filed with the FEC to establish a “Super PAC” with the goal of urging Mitt Romney for run, according to a press release sent to PoliticusUSA by “Ready for Romney”.
Republicans need to keep their eye on things like social media penetration during a presidential election when more young people vote, and tend to vote Democratic. None of the GOP 2016 hopefuls hold a candle to Democratic front runner former Secretary of State, First Lady and Senator Hillary Clinton yet, whose experience alone outshines the lot of them.
Jeb Bush is already dealing with the bad branding of his last name and the fact that he often looks like Karl Rove in pictures. He needs all of the social media love he can get if he’s going to overcome those obstacles and win an actual election — and by election I don’t mean a GOP primary, because they cheated their way into making Romney their chosen one in 2012.
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