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OP consultant Mike Murphy - who was last seen flying the well-funded Jeb super PAC Right-to-Rise USA into a mountain - has some thoughts on Marco Rubio's chances against Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. First up, don't use the Nevada results showing a blowout victory from Donald Trump "as a model" for the rest of the Republican primaries coming up:

It's never clear what the truth is when a campaign ends, but it gets ugly. One of the key types of people in creating a campaign are major fundraisers. And when campaigns fold, they talk sometimes, but usually in blind quotes. But one of the funders, who helped raise millions of dollars for a superPAC supporting Jeb Bush talked on the record with NPR's Morning Edition - and gave his version of what he felt went wrong. "I think the campaign was winnable, and we lost," Jamie Wareham, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, told NPR's Steve Inskeep Tuesday. Wareham donated more...

The Last Days with Jeb Bush: "Like a Funeral" (Video) NBC News Campaign Embed Jordan Frasier has been following the Bush campaign for seven months.

Right to Rise, the pro-Jeb Bush super PAC that raised a record-shattering sum, is canceling a wave of planned television advertising. The move, confirmed by two media tracking sources, follows Bush exiting the Republican primary Saturday night after a drubbing in South Carolina. The group canceled television buys in Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush dropped out of the Republican presidential primary two days ago, prompting campaign officials and supporters to look for a scapegoat for the debacle. They may have settled on a pricey one, indeed. Political strategist Mike Murphy, head of the pro-Bush super PAC Right to Rise USA, is under fire for allegedly giving himself a salary and compensation package that totals $14 million. "He made minimum of $14 million," a Bush campaign bundler told CNN.

When Donald Trump pointed the finger at Jeb Bush at the last debate and claimed he's got nothing to show for the millions his campaign has spent, he wasn't kidding. A review of how Bush and his allies spent over $125 million in his failed campaign shows the main thing to come out of it was a lot of consultants and local TV stations made a lot of money. A Washington Post review of Bush spending shows more than 95 percent of the advertising budget - from his campaign and the separate super PAC, Right to Rise - went to...

Mirroring the donor-backlash against Karl Rove after his American Crossroad/Crossroads GPS super PACs raised upwards of $300 million and produced a dismal 2012 success rate, Mike Murphy, the man in charge of the Jeb Bush Right to Rise USA super PAC is now in the crosshairs. Right to Rise's dismal results became painfully obvious when Bush dropped out of the race Saturday night after only three primary contests. CNN reports that donors are not happy: In the armchair quarterbacking following Bush's departure from the race Saturday night, Murphy is facing countless questions about the efficacy of the PAC spending tens...

One byproduct of Jeb Bush's long, agonizing slide out of the 2016 presidential race is that, by the time he finally packed it in this weekend, plenty of postmortems had almost certainly been prewritten. -snip- as donor grumbling became loud enough to penetrate even the most insular campaign, the guy handling all of Jeb's money, Right to Rise super-pac director and alleged strategic genius Mike Murphy, granted an unusual two-part interview to Bloomberg's Sasha Issenberg. It was designed to shame into silence anyone who'd been stupid enough to pay attention to anything that had happened thus far. Murphy described Donald...

After disappointing finishes in presidential nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Jeb Bush suspended his campaign for president Saturday night. It was the end of a run that had seemed doomed for months: countless gaffes, merciless attacks from the likes of Donald Trump, seemingly limitless spending from a superPAC he couldn't control with horrible returns from those investments and perhaps above all, a candidate who seemed uncomfortable on the trail at best, and at worst, frustrated and unhappy. Already, the post-mortems are almost writing themselves.

I'm feeling bad for Jeb Bush. I've never been a supporter of a third Bush presidency-having endured the highs and lows of the second up close-but I can't help but think about this coming Easter or Thanksgiving, or the next event when the whole Bush family is gathered around in one place. The Bushes may come across as kindly, low-key aristocrats. But have no doubt: They are ruthless competitors. When I worked for President George W. Bush, he was racing Karl Rove to see who could read the most books in a calendar year. His father used to challenge people...

Jeb Bush always remained optimistic. From the beginning of his candidacy last June, he pledged to run with "joy" and adopted a tortoise-and-the-hare strategy, earnestly believing that he would prevail in the end despite a crowded field of candidates. Even as his chances became grim over the past eight months, he started handing out tiny toy turtles from his pockets to children, telling them that "slow and steady wins the race." But in 2016, "slow and steady" was the opposite of what the country wanted. There's plenty of blame to go around for Bush's fall, but the central theme is...

For Jeb Bush's loyalists, the first moment of palpable panic - and there would be more than they ever expected in the months to come - built over four days last May when their not-yet-presidential candidate struggled repeatedly to utter a one-word answer - No - to an utterly predictable question: Should the U.S. have invaded Iraq? -snip- From the start, the campaign hired extensively and paid handsomely. That money, though, couldn't come from Right to Rise, which had pulled off a record $103 million haul in six months. The campaign needed to raise the cash itself. It couldn't keep...

For Jeb Bush's campaign, August was a cruel month. Donald Trump's attacks on the former Florida governor as a "low-energy" politician were beginning to stick, and the two were bickering over immigration. The issue before the Bush team was what to do about it. -snip- Mike Murphy, the chief strategist for Bush's super PAC, Right to Rise, explained what had happened this way on Sunday. "Our theory was to dominate the establishment lane into the actual voting primaries," he said. "That was the strategy, and it did not work. I think it was the right strategy for Jeb. The problem...

On a sweltering day in Miami last June, surrounded by a diverse group of supporters, Jeb Bush announced his candidacy for president of the United States. "My message will be an optimistic one," Bush promised. "I will campaign as I would serve: Going everywhere, speaking to everyone, keeping my word, facing the issues without flinching and staying true to what I believe." In a remarkable turn of events, eight months later, Bush -- the son and brother of presidents -- suspended his campaign, flanked by his tearful wife and youngest son. But in a race for the Republican nomination marked...

In the unsparing judgment of the Twittersphere, there was one clear loser after Jeb's Bush's graceful exit from the Republican presidential race Saturday night: political strategist Mike Murphy and the Bush-allied super PAC Right to Rise USA, which he directed. Murphy has long been one of Bush's closest advisers -- and the political world was in awe last year when Right to Rise raised $100 million just as Bush was launching his candidacy. Now, the super PAC will go down in history as yet another failed Murphy juggernaut. -snip- "He made minimum of $14 million," the bundler said, requesting anonymity...

As former Florida governor Jeb Bush suspended his presidential bid Saturday night, new details were trickling in about the massive investments the Right to Rise super PAC made to prop up his candidacy. As of Saturday, the group had raced through at least $95.7 million out of the $118.6 million it had collected by the end of January, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Almost $87 million went into a barrage of television ads, online videos, slick mailers and voter phone calls. The group flew an airplane with a banner mocking Donald Trump over a rally of his supporters, produced...

His campaign started out stuffed with money. By last July, Jeb Bush had raised $103 million for his super PAC, Right to Rise, an astonishing sum that seemed to foretell the most lavishly funded campaign in American history. No super PAC had ever raised so much cash so early in an election cycle. In fact, Right to Rise alone outraised all the super PACs combined at the same stage in the 2012 elections. Now, after primary elections in just three states, Bush is out. He finished sixth in the Iowa caucus, fourth in the New Hampshire primary, and now, fourth...

Jeb Bush, the Republican establishment's last, best hope, began his 2016 campaign rationally enough, with a painstakingly collated operational blueprint his team called, with NFL swagger, "The Playbook." On page after page kept safe in a binder, the playbook laid out a strategy for a race his advisors were certain would be played on Bush's terms - an updated, if familiar version of previous Bush family campaigns where cash, organization and a Republican electorate ultimately committed to an electable center-right candidate would prevail. The playbook, hatched by Sally Bradshaw, Mike Murphy and a handful of other Bush confidants in dozens...

To Mike Dennehy, Jeb Bush is a lost cause, an opinion expressed on a near-daily basis by political pundits and shared by many here in the Granite State. The state whose motto is "Live Free or Die" has quickly become do or die for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. The problem is, Bush may already be "dead" to most voters. "So what do you think about Bush?" I asked Mike Dennehy, a GOP strategist with two-plus decades of experience in New Hampshire, over coffee Thursday morning. "Boy, that's one of the saddest stories of the entire campaign," he responded.

Will the Bush family legacy be the primary victim of Jeb's campaign? There is another Republican debate tonight and Jeb Bush will participate despite his lagging campaign and poll numbers. The Real Clear Politics average of polls has Bush at 4.7 percent. Jeb's message never caught on despite plenty of media attention and financial backing. It didn't help that he is an establishment candidate or that he's viewed by many as a legacy candidate like Hillary Clinton. Bush has tried to jump start his campaign by attacking Donald Trump numerous times but that has backfired and worked in Trump's favor....