What Donald Trump can learn from George W. Bush about winning Hispanic voters

Bush's Hispanic surge in 2004 was further reaching and helped him win states Donald Trump lost

We’re now in the middle of one of those way-too-online primary season spats with Donald Trump trying to disqualify Ron DeSantis as a “Bush Republican.” The inciting event here is that Jeb Bush was a previous Florida governor who made an appearance at DeSantis’s inauguration and has said nice things about his successor. The missing context here is that before he was the purported avatar of a squishy establishment open-borders consensus, Jeb! had a reputation as the more conservative of the brothers, who probably lost his first gubernatorial bid in 1994 because he ran too far to the right. Had Jeb Bush emerged victorious in 1994, many believe that he, not George W. Bush, would have been the heir apparent for the 2000 presidential nomination.

The current spat is representative of all the ways that the term “Bush Republican” is now an epithet in the modern MAGA-ified GOP. Yet for all the political success Donald Trump has achieved—busting up the Blue Wall, coming within less than a point o…