Follow the Money: Profesor McDaniel Shows How Donors Explain Candidates' Ideology

VOX -- And here’s another look at the chart up top from Jason McDaniel, a professor at San Francisco State, which shows CFscores for every open seat GOP presidential winner going back to Reagan, as well as Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. The red dots show the average scores for presidential candidates that cycle, with Reagan as the only conservative donor candidate to defeat rivals backed by more moderate donors, on average. So Jeb’s donors look a whole lot like his dad’s, Dole’s, McCain’s and Romney’s, in terms of both overall score and placement relative to that year’s field. Walker, on the other hand, has the most conservative group of donors overall and is about as far to the right of his rivals’ average score as Reagan was. McDaniel’s overall takeaway from this chart is that, “If the recent history of Republican nomination contests is any guide, the party is likely to decide that Scott Walker is too ideologically extreme to be the Republican nominee in 2016.”