Bush's favorability was 50/28% in their October 2014 poll, and now it's 43/45%. Pretty remarkable collapse, given how the campaign is still in the early stages.
Yeah, I'm curious what's driven it. Bad press for his fumbled Iraq answer? Maybe his immigration views becoming better known?
Well, October was back when there was still a great deal of uncertainty as to whether he was even going to be running at all. It was before his December Super PAC launch. So back then, most voters probably knew very little about him besides his last name. Now that he's (effectively, though not yet legally) running, he's gotten himself into the "moderate" niche, and GOP voters who know more about him know not just about the Iraq thing, but also immigration, Common Core, etc.
I've said this before, but people who say "McCain and Romney won the nomination, so that proves that the GOP nominates `moderates'" miss the key point that McCain* and Romney did an awful lot of pandering to the party base. They were `moderates' who ran as `conservatives'. Bush isn't doing all *that* much pandering, at least not yet. He's got to sell out more, if he wants to win.
* McCain 2008 is a bit more complicated than Romney 2012 in this regard. Romney 2012 was a straight up pander-fest in the primaries. McCain 2008 started that way, but after his campaign imploded in Summer 2007, he went back to mavericky-ness on certain issues, like climate change, at least for a while. Still, he was the uber-hawk of uber-hawks during the Iraq War surge debate. What is Bush's issue like that?
Bush seemed to recognize that McCain and Romney couldn't, in the general, recover from their pandering in the primaries, and he openly declared his strategy was not to pander. But he has here or there anyway e.g. the religious freedom bill. (Not that he was insincere, just appeasing the religious base) and assume he will do so the more he struggles, whether or not he competes in Iowa.
Walker has staying power in IA. He's had a fairly solid lead there for 3 months, even though he hasn't announced yet. Definitely not a flavor of the month.
What really drives the flavor of the month thing is candidates falling apart on a debate stage, under media and rival scrutiny and attack ads. It's still too early to know how Walker will withstand any and all of that but his press stumbles show signs that he could implode. As does the still relatively little scrutiny he's gotten. I haven't seen anyone here talking about the shady loan his economic council gave out to his donor but there's a pretty strong whiff of corruption around Walker that could blow over or could turn out to be a serious problem for him. His leading for a few months in the first half of 2015 doesn't tell us much about how that will play out.
