Jeb Bush didn’t fix it. His attempted attacks on rivals have fallen flat. His $30 million in TV ads have failed to move his numbers. And now, with the Iowa caucuses less than two months away, he’s polling at a miserable 3 percent nationally.

But there’s one significant success that is keeping his campaign alive: Jeb Bush has convinced major GOP donors and supporters that the polls are wrong.

“I am like the Israelites following Moses, and I am not the only one,” said Mike Fernandez, the top donor to Bush’s super PAC, after a new CNN poll showed Bush an astounding 33 points behind the poll leader. “Unfortunately, it might not be that many of us.”

While rival campaigns boast that some Bush backers are making side bets on other candidates, hardly any Bush donors have publicly abandoned him — largely out of unwavering loyalty to an incomparable Republican dynasty and to a candidate many put on a pedestal in spite of his political shortcomings.

“Given the poll numbers currently, you would think there would be these massive defections from a campaign like this,” said Slater Bayliss, a Florida-based GOP operative and longtime Bush ally. “And the reason there haven’t been is Jeb Bush; because people believe he’s in it for the long haul and believe he’s a serious candidate — even in a cycle where serious doesn’t seem to be selling. They like him because he’s serious. Eventually, they think serious will sell.”

Outside the steady-under-fire nature of Bush’s top-level donors, he has kept his campaign together because of the true-believer nature of campaign manager Danny Diaz and longtime adviser Sally Bradshaw. Both are expert in making regular, data-filled pitches of proprietary campaign research that put worried donors at relative ease.

The two, along with longtime Bush aide and South Carolina director Brett Doster, will make yet another presentation to top donors on Saturday in Miami. Their bottom-line message is unchanged: National polls aren’t predictive of primary success and the campaign’s organizational efforts will bear fruit. More privately, Bush’s team says there’s still time to engineer an unlikely comeback. 

Many of the donors gathering in Miami, however loyal, are planning to ask tough questions. As 2015 draws to a close, a growing number of Bush’s most loyal staffers and supporters can’t help but acknowledge the cold reality that the candidate whom some expected to “shock and awe” his rivals into oblivion is in danger of becoming an afterthought before voting even begins.

“We’re not gonna sugarcoat it. It’s bad. But we know what we have to face and these are sophisticated people,” said one Bush donor.

Bush’s campaign backers more readily acknowledge now that the candidate has an exceedingly slim chance of placing in the top three in Iowa. But in New Hampshire, they say, “it’s a total jump ball.” There’s a five- to six-candidate tie for second place “and we are right in the mix,” one campaign adviser said.

The campaign is also now talking about South Carolina, which will factor more in Saturday’s presentation than it has in earlier donor presentations in Kennebunkport, Maine, (which focused on New Hampshire) and in Houston (which focused on Iowa). South Carolina, the campaign says, has been good to the Bush family and the candidate’s internal polling numbers there and in New Hampshire show he’s doing better, and he’s converting more undecided voters into campaign volunteers. 

The campaign, though, would not share its data.

All of Bush world’s operating theories about the race — the idea that a well-funded super PAC would give Bush an edge, that Donald Trump was a passing fad, that a decade-old record of governorship would matter and that the electorate would come around to Bush’s more accepting positions on immigration reform and Common Core — have turned out, so far anyway, to be wrong.

“Jeb just isn’t very talented at this. And the problem is that Jeb has been coddled by a group of people who worship Jeb,” said one high-level Republican strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They ran a campaign based on what they wanted the party to be, instead of what the party was.”

In an especially fluid race — Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson have risen and fallen while Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz started slow but have been tracking up — Bush’s mid-single digits poll numbers have been one glaring constant. But, Bush’s campaign sees little significance in national polls. “We have no expectation of dramatic changes in national polls, we have the best ground game in the early states that will be able to capitalize on voters there gravitating to a proven conservative leader with a plan to defeat ISIS and fix a broken DC,” said Tim Miller, Bush’s communications director.

Before the campaign and Right to Rise started advertising in the early states, top Bush bundlers had been optimistic about changing the trajectory of the race but clear-eyed about what it might mean if the autumn ad buy failed to change the numbers. “We’ll know by Thanksgiving whether we’ve got a candidate or a turkey,” one longtime Bush bundler from Washington said back in October.

Bush then launched his “Jeb Can Fix It” tour. But his poll numbers sank further.
Now, in early December, there is little left for donors to say.

Mike Murphy, the Los Angeles-based ad man running Bush’s Right to Rise super PAC, isn’t about to leave the $75 million left in the group’s bank account unspent and is readying a 15-minute biographical film about Bush.

According to another source close to Right to Rise, Murphy has been floating another tactical shift to potential supporters, suggesting that he might spend the bulk of the $75 million to carpet bomb MarcoRubio, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Chris Christie — everyone but Trump. The thinking: Making the race into a binary choice between Bush and Trump might be the only way a majority of primary voters go with Bush.

Inside Bush’s Miami headquarters, which was hollowed out in the fall as the campaign downsized and shifted resources to New Hampshire, partly in response to fundraising struggles, hope is getting harder to come by.

Senior staffers like Diaz and Bradshaw continue to project confidence that things will turn around. The communications team continues to aggressively push its narrative, while the opposition research shop is churning out data points for reporters to weaponize against other GOP candidates.

But in more private conversations, many on Bush’s payroll are turning to resignation and even gallows humor. One lamented to friends about not getting to spend the entire winter in Miami; others have been wondering aloud if the campaign will even make it through January to the first in the nation Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1.

“I think staff morale is exceedingly low,” said a Bush donor based in New York City. “I suspect they know they’re in a death spiral now. There’s no getting out of this.”

In spite of those worries starting to bubble to the surface, Bush appears resolved to fight on, still expressing steely confidence to close associates and anyone who questions his viability: “I’m going to win this damn thing,” he’ll often say.

He has already suffered months of indignities as his campaign has failed to meet the high expectations it set for itself early on, when Bush’s team sought to scare potential rivals — namely, Mitt Romney and Rubio — out of challenging his bid for the nomination. Illustrations of Bush’s low standing are everywhere: in the polls, in Chris Christie surpassing him in New Hampshire, in campaign fundraisers morphing into “friend-raisers” — free to anyone who will come.

But few see any benefit in Bush exiting the race before voting begins in February, especially given the strong early state organization he’s put in place and the millions in ammunition his super PAC has yet to unload.

“He can’t pull out until after March 1,” another GOP operative said. “He’s got to see what happens, or else it’s humiliating the family name. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It’s very frustrating.”
Those who know Bush’s competitive nature refuse to underestimate him. “I play golf with him, and the worst thing I can do is get up three or four strokes on the guy,” said Bayliss, who got his first job on Bush's 1998 campaign and has been close to him ever since. “Because the next thing you know, he focuses and he’s up four strokes on me.

“He just digs deep when things aren’t going well and never gives up. I’ve never seen resolve like his before.”