@engineer,
When you pry it from his cold, dead fingers. No, wait, that's Ted Cruz.
Since Jeb doesn't have other, pressing business, like a senatorial or gubernatorial seat to defend, or a private company that requires his personal, day to day attention, I presume he'll stay in the race as long as he has funding to do so.
Despite rumors of impatient donors, his fundraising position seems fine according to the latest quarterly reports filed.
Jeb repeatedly says that he takes the long view. Presumably this reflects conventional wisdom which his donors share, since Jeb is conventional and presumably backers attracted to him are too.
What this means in practice is this: imagine a horserace where certain privileged spectators are allowed to put up tripwires even as the horses are rounding the bend for the final lap or two.
In this case the privileged spectators are political PACs and the tripwires are propaganda in the form of one negative television and radio ad after another, exposing or purporting to expose every doctrinal inconsistency, bad decision, and skeleton in the closet of opposing frontrunners.
Just look at what happened to Hilary's poll numbers during the recent e-mail scandal. If that had been done later it might have had an effect on the nomination process. But now her poll numbers have recovered. It seems as though voters are both fickle and possessed of short memories.
Donald Trump has been getting a free ride, but his past actions and positions in the public record make him a walking time bomb and vulnerable to saturation advertising of a negative sort by Republican PACs with patriotic and conservative sounding names.
Ben Carson is a nebbish who follows a Christian sect that is at least as cultish and deviationist as Mormonism. I wonder what evangelical Republicans will say when it comes to their attention that Carson doesn't believe in an afterlife and that heaven and hell don't exist. (A belief in resurrection and judgment isn't the same in his case.) Why Donald Trump doesn't make hay with this (or discretely get somebody else to do it for him, since Trump may not want to open that can of worms personally), I don't know. Carson also has or had close connections to a debunked nutritional supplement cum cure-all and has been sued for major malpractice in his area of medical expertise. Then there are his stories of teenaged violence. I'd be surprised if his opponents haven't put private investigators onto that, who have dug up actual or supposed witnesses ready to spring some very unpleasant testimonials.
Jeb is such a middle of the road, conventional figure,that I doubt anything can be dug up on him for a primary campaign, except RINO tendencies. At some point, when everyone else has been covered in mud, and the political pundits start making the point over and over that the party needs a candidate who can win a general election, his prospects might rise.
