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GUEST WORDS--Donald Trump may be the presumptive G.O.P. candidate for the 2020 election cycle, but that doesn’t mean the party’s voters are enamored of the concept. A recent Marist poll found that 44 percent of Republican voters would like to see a primary challenger. Four in 10 Republican voters feel the same way in New Hampshire, as do more than 60 percent in Iowa. But with the exception of casual Libertarian Bill Weld, who announced his intention to take on Trump in 2020, there have been few Republicans willing to speak up for the silent minority—until now.
Emerging from obscurity to undermine Trump is none other than former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the onetime presumptive candidate for the G.O.P. presidential nomination who was mercilessly and unexpectedly crushed under the heel of Trumpism in 2016. “I think someone should run. Just because Republicans ought to be given a choice,” he tells former Obama strategist David Axelrod in an episode of The Axe Files airing Saturday. It would be hard to overcome Trump’s “loyal base,” Bush admits, much less unseat a sitting president in a primary. “But to have a conversation about what it is to be a conservative I think is important.” (Read the rest.)
-cw
