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Jeb Bush and key members of his national finance team addressed top donors on Wednesday in a conciliatory conference call in which he expressed dismay over the outcome of the race. "I'm sorry that it didn't turn out the way that I intended when I launched the campaign," Bush said. The former Florida governor said he saw a path to win the nomination running as a "reform-minded conservative," but acknowledged that wasn't what the electorate was looking for in 2016. -snip- Also addressing donors on Wednesday's conference call were Bush national finance chairman Woody Johnson, who owns the New York...

Jeb Bush's K Street supporters are reeling from the sudden end of his presidential campaign. After pouring donations into the coffers of the former Florida governor's campaign and super-PAC, many of the lobbyists who worked to put Bush in the White House are feeling shell shocked. Of the two-dozen Bush-aligned lobbyists contacted by The Hill, almost half said they plan to take a break from presidential politics. "I feel like I need to take a breather and watch from the sidelines over the next couple of weeks before diving back in," said Kimberley Fritts, CEO of the Podesta Group, when...

Jeb Bush has finally put his presidential campaign out of its misery. But it wasn't so long ago that Jeb was widely seen as the candidate to beat in the Republican presidential primary. Pundits predicted that Bush was almost as inevitable a nominee as Hillary Clinton was. Commentators cast Bush as the Republican Party's best chance at leaving Clinton shaking in her boots. Between his "rock star name" and the gusher of money he had flowing into his campaign before even announcing, Bush was thought to have the nomination nearly at his fingertips. Then reality intervened. The former Florida governor...

It ended without an exclamation point. On a mild Saturday night in South Carolina, Jeb Bush took to the stage at his victory party (using those two words in the least literal sense) and told supporters that he was out. It wasn't supposed to be this way. When Jeb jumped in, Tea Partiers panicked and grassroots conservatives lit their hair on fire. He carried an air of inevitability after all-at its onset, his campaign practically drowned in shock-and-awe money and big name endorsements. But from its inception, there were cracks. When he spoke at CPAC a few months before his...

Jeb Bush’s campaign has fallen short of expectations. At one time the Republican front-runner with substantial money behind his campaign's super PAC, the former Florida Governor was the man to beat. Then, billionaire Donald Trump emerged as a more serious contender than his veteran team had anticipated. Bush never quit figured out how to deal with him, and finished well behind him Saturday in South Carolina.

On the heels of the disastrous and obscene Omnibus Spending Orgy rubber stamped by the Obama Republicans in Congress last week – there is actually hope that we have turned the corner against the Republican Establishment wing of the Washington Cartel. It reminds me of the old adage about going bankrupt – first it happens slowly and then suddenly. That seems to describe the fall of the GOP establishment. The reality they face today is totally different from the one in 2014 – let alone 2012, 2010 and 2008. And yet, without some of the efforts in those cycles, we...

Jeb Bush campaign manager Danny Diaz got into a heated confrontation with a CNBC producer outside the debate as it was happening, according to two sources familiar with the incident. One of the sources said Diaz was complaining about speaking time allotments. A CNBC spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. “I expressed my displeasure about the way the debate was managed and the amount of time [we got],” said Diaz, who declined to comment further.

HOUSTON — Right to Rise USA, the super PAC supporting former Florida governor Jeb Bush's campaign for president, is considering deploying ground staff to key states after focusing most heavily on running television ads so far. It's a notable strategic consideration that comes as Bush's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has struggled to gain traction in early-voting states and as it makes moves to curtail costs in what began as a sprawling operation.

he Rev. James Linzey, a retired Army chaplain and vocal leader among some conservative Evangelicals, sums up his ardent support for Donald Trump with a simple observation: “Because he tells it like it is, and he exudes honesty and transparency, and that he’s the kind of person who is not going to deceive us,” says Reverend Linzey, who now heads the Military Bible Association in Escondido, Calif., and who publicly endorsed the Manhattan billionaire on Thursday. “Evangelicals are tired of being deceived by wolves in sheep’s clothing.” Indeed, even as the evangelical minister praises Mr. Trump as “someone with the...

Independent businessman and political enigma Greg Orman (46 percent) is leading three-term Republican incumbent Pat Roberts (41 percent) in the race for U.S. Senate in Kansas, with 11 percent undecided, according to the latest Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll of likely voters in the general election. In the race for governor, Democratic state Rep. Paul Davis (46 percent) is leading incumbent Sam Brownback (42 percent), a Republican, with 6 percent undecided in the survey conducted by the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston.

A tea party leader is favored to become Texas' lieutenant governor. A Ted Cruz-endorsed newcomer is inching closer to replacing Democrat Wendy Davis in the statehouse. On television, millions of dollars in attack ads have given established Republican incumbents all they can handle. For all the talk of Texas growing competitive for Democrats in 2016 and beyond, GOP voters are poised to make a harder turn right on Tuesday. Though the tea party has sputtered this year in elections around the country, Texas' conservative insurgents are the front-runners in Republican primary runoffs for major statewide offices and positioned to bolster...

The Republican primary race for Nebraska governor is a dead heat between Attorney General Jon Bruning and businessman Pete Ricketts, while Midland University President Ben Sasse has built a sizable lead over his GOP rivals for the state's open U.S. Senate seat, according to new poll numbers. The Magellan Strategies poll of 525 likely Republican voters was conducted May 8 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.3 percentage points. The poll was conducted one day after Bruning received endorsements from Gov. Dave Heineman and Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert. The results were posted online by the Legacy...

Conservative Nebraska Senate candidate Ben Sasse has opened up a 14-point lead in the latest poll before Tuesday's GOP primary. A Megellan Strategies survey of likely GOP primary voters, 92% of whom said they would definitely vote in the May 13 primary, found Sasse leading with 38%, while liberal Republican Sid Dinsdale is in second with 24%. Establishment Republican Shane Osborn, who is backed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), is in third with 20%. Sasse is endorsed by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT), conservative talk radio host Mark Levin, the...

Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney's campaign manager, is one of the founders of America Rising. Hunkered down with laptops and legal pads in the business center of a suburban apartment building, the young guns at the newest super PAC in town could pass for a bunch of mathletes preparing for the next competition. It's not much of a war room, but who cares? After an election cycle in which slick Republican super PACs like American Crossroads and Restore Our Future were panned for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on television ads that failed to move the needle, America Rising is...

Sen. Rand Paul ended his self-described filibuster against the confirmation of President Obama's nominee to lead the CIA early Thursday - at 12:39 EST -- just short of thirteen hours after the Kentucky Republican and tea party favorite began speaking. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, also a Kentucky Republican, said he would continue to oppose Brennan's confirmation and try to keep the debate going. After Paul yielded the floor, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., filed a motion to cut off debate on Brennan's nomination and bring it up for a vote....

On night two of the Republican National Convention, Fox News Channel was once again the network more people went to to get their political fix. That said, every network was down substantially from the same night in 2008, when Sarah Palin made her RNC debut.

This is the worst omen for Dick Lugar in a slew of bad omens this week. The SuperPAC which has dumped $600,000 of advertising into the Indianapolis market is pulling out of the race: The American Action Network is pulling out of the Indiana GOP Senate primary, dropping its efforts on behalf of embattled Sen. Dick Lugar less than two weeks before the May 8 election, sources told POLITICO. Dan Conston, a spokesman for AAN, explained: “We’ve decided we’re going to let this race play out.” The group has already begun to pull its TV dollars; no further ads will...

Mitt Romney's march to a possible Republican presidential nomination just got a lot longer and harder. Front-runner Romney left Tuesday's round of three nominating contests with another reminder of his own shortcomings, after a two-state winning streak that had placed him firmly in the driver's seat in the nomination race. Bad losses to rival Rick Santorum in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota raised more questions about whether conservative Republicans are ready to give their hearts to a millionaire former Massachusetts governor who once supported abortion rights and a government requirement that people have health insurance.