Please Clap: Bush Family Member's Electoral Failure in Maine Is More Evidence RINO Establishment Is Dead
Finally, a Bush probably won’t have to prompt people to clap.
With most of the political news out of Maine dominated by the Democrats’ Senate nominee Graham Platner, many Americans might have missed another major news story out of the Pine Tree State in the 2026 primary season, but it was a death knell to dynastic politics in the U.S.
Jonathan Bush — a member of a family responsible for two meh presidents and a slew of other disappointing candidates — couldn’t survive Maine’s ranked-choice voting system in the Republican primary for governor, as the New York Post reported Friday.
Bush, a nephew of George H.W. Bush, the 41st president, and cousin of George W. Bush, president No. 43, was vying to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in Maine. (Mills herself withdrew from the Democratic primary for Senate after it was clear she was going to lose to Platner, the hobbyist oysterman and Nazi/latrine enthusiast.)
Bush didn’t exactly have the sense to withdraw, however. Despite having no real experience in the political world, he embarked on a campaign in one of the two states that his family dynasty calls home.
Maine employs a ranked-choice system, where voters choose multiple candidates in order of preference. As the ballots are tallied, the last-place candidate is eliminated in rounds of counting until one candidate gets over 50 percent of the vote.
While the primary was June 8, final results weren’t announced until early Friday morning, according to WMTW-TV in Portland.
It was clear after the first round that Bush was in trouble — he was in third place with 19.7 percent of the vote, with political novice Ben Midgley (20.1 percent) and longtime Republican Party lawyer and politico Bobby Charles (37.9 percent) ahead of him, according to Ballotpedia.
In the sixth round of tabulation, confirmed on Friday, Bush was eliminated and Charles declared the winner. He’ll go on and face Hannah Pingree in the general election.
The race as a whole was a blow to dynastic politics in general, with Angus King III — son of Maine Sen. Angus King — finishing dead last on the Democratic side.
However, dynastic politics weren’t the only thing dogging 57-year-old Jonathan Bush. A 2006 admission that he’d been violent to his first wife, reported by the U.K.’s Daily Mail in 2018, didn’t help his cause. He was also at the center of a sexual harassment complaint filed against him when he was CEO of a health care company he founded, as the New York Post reported in 2018.
Regardless, the loss was evidence that you just can’t show up with a family name that gets people inside the Beltway to coo and expect to get yourself a position.
Jonathan Bush’s humiliation comes 10 years after another one of his cousins, Jeb(!) Bush, attempted to leap from governor of Florida to president of the United States of America — a leap that landed with a thud thanks to the candidacy of then-up-and-coming Donald J. Trump.
In a year where Americans — and Republican voters in particular — were fed up with politics as usual, Jeb(!) was the face of politics as usual — a man trading on an establishment family name to win the nomination, and a media establishment that thought this made him the favorite.
Instead, he presented one of the biggest self-owns in American politics since Democrat Michael Dukakis’ ill-fated ride tank ride in 1988.
In a Feb. 2, 2016, campaign speech in New Hampshire, he declared he was in the race to get the country “back in the business of creating a more peaceful world.” As an applause line, it bombed so badly, Bush interrupted himself to ask the audience, “Please clap.”
With #YouTubeDOWN happening, here’s the Jeb Bush “please clap” video to hold you over pic.twitter.com/NtbGZfv4y7
— Sammy Buch (@sammmybuch) May 19, 2021
JEB BUSH AND THE BUSHES NEVER RECOVERED FROM THIS…🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/qLfC8DQBdi
— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) September 25, 2023
Jeb(!) won a grand total of zero primaries and withdrew before the calendar flipped over to March.
And yet another dynasty was toppled that year: Hillary Clinton, who was effectively handed the nomination by the Democratic National Committee, lost to Trump in the general election.
Up to Election Day 2016, the chattering class was chattering about how there hadn’t been a president without the last name Bush, Clinton, or Obama since 1989, and that streak would likely keep going until 2021 at least. And then the results started coming in and the panic began rising.
For 10 years now, we’ve known that you can’t just get by on your name. Yet, as the Maine gubernatorial primary proved, some candidates still try to pull it off. Thankfully, the primary proved that doesn’t work as well as it used to.
Now, please clap.
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