105 Facts About Jeb Bush

Jeb Bush graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a degree in Latin American affairs.

In 1994, Jeb Bush made his first run for office, losing the election for governor by less than two percentage points to the incumbent Lawton Chiles.

Jeb Bush ran again in 1998 and defeated lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay with 55 percent of the vote, however he would succeed MacKay after Chiles died in office 23 days shy of his retirement.

Jeb Bush ran for reelection in 2002, defeating Bill McBride and winning with 56 percent, to become Florida's first two-term Republican governor.

Jeb Bush suspended his campaign on February 20,2016, shortly after the South Carolina primary, and endorsed Senator Ted Cruz on March 23,2016.

Jeb Bush was born on February 11,1953, in Midland, Texas.

Jeb Bush grew up with two younger brothers, Neil and Marvin, one younger sister, Dorothy, one older brother, George, who is seven years older, and, for the first eight months of his life, an older sister, Robin.

Jeb Bush completed ninth grade in Houston, but was advised to repeat it at Andover, and was nearly expelled due to poor grades.

Jeb Bush recreationally used marijuana, hashish, and cigarettes during his high school years, although he made the honor roll by the end of his senior year and served as captain of the tennis team.

At the age of 17, Jeb Bush taught English as a second language and assisted in the building of a school in Ibarrilla, a small village outside of Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico, as part of Andover's student exchange summer program.

Jeb Bush, who had largely avoided criticizing or supporting the Vietnam War, registered for the draft after his graduation from high school in 1971.

Jeb Bush played on the Texas Longhorns varsity tennis team in 1973.

Jeb Bush completed his coursework in two and a half years.

In 1974, Jeb Bush went to work in an entry-level position in the international division of Texas Commerce Bank, which was founded by the family of James Baker.

Jeb Bush took a job in real estate with Armando Codina, a 32-year-old Cuban immigrant and self-made millionaire.

Jeb Bush did lobby the Reagan administration vigorously and successfully on behalf of Recarey and IMC.

Jeb Bush volunteered for his father's campaigns in 1980 and 1988.

Jeb Bush served in that role from 1987 to 1988, before resigning to work on his father's presidential campaign.

Jeb Bush frequently communicated with his father's staff from 1981 through 1992.

The younger Jeb Bush recommended Dexter Lehtinen for the post of US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida and set up a meeting between the Jeb Bush Administration and Motorola.

Jeb Bush advocated for Cuban exiles living in South Florida, and supported the Cuban embargo.

In 1990, Jeb Bush urged his father to pardon Orlando Bosch, a Cuban exile who had been convicted of firing a rocket into a Polish ship which was on passage to Cuba.

In 1989, Jeb Bush was the campaign manager of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the first Cuban-American to serve in Congress, in her special election.

In 1994, Jeb Bush launched an unsuccessful bid for the Governor's office against incumbent Democratic Governor Lawton Chiles.

Florida prosecutors and former Supreme Court justices toured the state with Chiles saying that Jeb Bush didn't know what he was talking about.

Jeb Bush tried to justify running it by saying that Chiles was in his opinion, "liberal on crime," and hadn't yet acted on some other death warrants.

Jeb Bush lost the election by only 63,940 votes out of 4,206,076 that were cast for the major party candidates.

Alongside T Willard Fair, the president of the Urban League's Miami affiliate, Bush helped to establish Florida's first charter school.

Jeb Bush ran again for governor in 1998, defeating Democrat Buddy MacKay, who was lieutenant governor.

Jeb Bush ran for reelection in 2002 to become Florida's first two-term Republican governor.

Jeb Bush was governor when his brother George won an intensely fought election recount in Florida to become president.

Jeb Bush recused himself from any official role in the recount.

In 1998, Jeb Bush defeated his Democratic opponent, Lieutenant Governor Buddy MacKay, by over 418,000 votes to become Governor of Florida.

Simultaneously, his brother, George W Bush won a re-election victory for a second term as Governor of Texas, and they became the first siblings to govern two states simultaneously since Nelson and Winthrop Rockefeller governed New York and Arkansas from 1967 to 1971.

Jeb Bush was unopposed in the 2002 Republican gubernatorial primary, and in the general election he faced Democratic challenger Bill McBride.

Jeb Bush won the white female vote in the swing-voting battleground of Central Florida's I-4 corridor.

Jeb Bush became the first Republican governor of Florida to win re-election.

An analysis conducted by economist Martin Sullivan, which eliminated the effects of the federal estate tax repeal and inflation, estimated the cumulative reduction in taxes by the state at closer to 13 billion during Jeb Bush's tenure, resulting in tax savings by 2006 of 140 per person, per year.

Jeb Bush has been a proponent of school vouchers and charter schools, especially in areas of the state with failing public schools, although to date very few schools have received failing grades from the state.

Jeb Bush established the McKay Scholarship Program which provides vouchers for students with learning disabilities to attend a school of their choice.

Jeb Bush established the A+ Opportunity Scholarship Program which provided vouchers to students.

Jeb Bush helped create the Corporate Income Tax Credit Scholarship which provides corporations with tax credits for donations to Scholarship Funding Organizations.

Jeb Bush declined to raise taxes for education, which led him to oppose a ballot initiative to amend the Florida Constitution to cap growing school class sizes.

Jeb Bush said he had "a couple of devious plans if this thing passes".

In higher education, Jeb Bush approved three new medical schools during his tenure and put forth the "One Florida" proposal, an initiative that had the effect of ending affirmative action admissions programs at state universities.

The Florida Senate, a majority of which were Republican, opposed Jeb Bush's proposed caps on non-economic damages for injury and wrongful death.

Jeb Bush insisted, and called the legislature into five special sessions.

The contentious debate even included a senior Jeb Bush staffer calling for primary opposition to Republicans who disagreed with the Governor on the reforms.

Jeb Bush passed a reform to Florida's Medicaid system that moved recipients into private managed care systems.

Jeb Bush was involved in the Terri Schiavo case, involving a woman with massive brain damage, who was on a feeding tube for over 15 years, and whose husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, wished to remove the tube.

Jeb Bush signed "Terri's Law", legislation passed by the Florida legislature that authorized him, as governor, to keep Schiavo on life support.

Jeb Bush signed legislation to restore the Everglades in 2000 as part of a 8 billion project in conjunction with the federal government.

Jeb Bush set aside over one million acres of land for conservation as part of a land purchase program.

In 2001, Jeb Bush eliminated civil service protection for over 16,000 state jobs, which had the effect of making it easier to fire employees in those positions.

In 2004, Jeb Bush supported an unsuccessful bill to allow illegal immigrants to be issued drivers licenses by the state.

Jeb Bush supported more than a dozen new protections for gun owners.

Jeb Bush is an advocate of capital punishment and 21 prisoners were executed during his term.

Jeb Bush often used the line-item veto to limit state spending.

Jeb Bush exercised his veto to stop other legislation as well.

The high-speed rail project nearly came to fruition until Jeb Bush became governor in 1999 and ended the project his second day in office, stating that the venture posed too much risk and cost for Florida taxpayers.

Jeb Bush vetoed funding for both the project and the board, and led a high-profile campaign to repeal the constitutional requirement that mandated the construction of the high-speed system.

Jeb Bush has been criticized by some in the Tea Party as not being sufficiently conservative, as he supports positions on immigration and Common Core that are unpopular with some conservatives.

Jeb Bush publicly criticized the national Republican party for its adherence to "an orthodoxy that doesn't allow for disagreement" on June 11,2012.

Jeb Bush would "have had a hard time" finding support in the contemporary GOP.

In October 2013, Jeb Bush called for passage of immigration reform.

From 2004 to 2007, Jeb Bush served as a board member for the National Assessment Governing Board.

In October 2013, referring to opponents of the standards, Jeb Bush said that while "criticisms and conspiracy theories are easy attention grabbers", he instead wanted to hear their solutions to the problems in American education.

In May 2006, Jeb Bush was approached to become the next commissioner of the National Football League.

Jeb Bush has served on the board of InnoVida, Swisher Hygiene, and Rayonier and has served as an adviser to Barclays.

Jeb Bush had been considered a potential candidate in the 2016 presidential election since the end of the 2012 election.

On October 2,2014, George W Bush said that his brother "wants to be President".

On December 16,2014, Jeb Bush announced via Facebook that he would be "actively exploring" a 2016 run to become President of the United States and at the end of the year resigned several corporate boards.

In February 2015, Jeb Bush released several thousand emails from his time as governor online.

However, Jeb Bush created controversy by releasing some emails that included some personal details such as social security numbers, names, and addresses, as well as the contents of the messages.

In May 2015, it was reported that Jeb Bush had been raising money since January 2015, estimated to be close to 100 million, for his super PAC, Right to Rise.

Jeb Bush announced his candidacy on June 15,2015, at a multicultural campus of Miami Dade College.

That night, Jeb Bush suspended his campaign, ending his presidential bid, and subsequently endorsed Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

In May 2016, Jeb Bush announced he would neither vote for Trump nor Clinton.

Jeb Bush has addressed myriad political issues over the course of his career, many of them during his governorship as already described.

Jeb Bush generally rejects the scientific consensus on climate change, which is that climate change is real, progressing, dangerous, and primarily caused by human activity.

Jeb Bush favors repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and replacing it with a "market-oriented" alternative.

In 2015, Jeb Bush took the position that people in the United States illegally should have a path to legal status, but not a path to citizenship, and said that legal status and avoiding deportation should require immigrants to pay fines, get work permits, pay taxes, not receive government assistance, learn English, and not commit crimes.

Jeb Bush holds that businesses should have the right to refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings on religious grounds.

In July 2015, Jeb Bush said he supported lifting the military's ban on allowing transgender people to openly serve in the military, so long as "the military's comfortable with this" and it did not impact morale.

In 2015, Jeb Bush said he was conflicted about the death penalty.

In September 2020, Jeb Bush told The Carlos Watson Show that he was interested in the concept of a universal basic income, as popularized by 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

Jeb Bush supports cutting taxes for all Americans and believes they do better with less government interference.

In 2015, Jeb Bush said that he does not support a further major commitment of US troops in Iraq to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, saying that such a deployment is not needed to defeat ISIS.

Jeb Bush has not ruled out such a deployment in the future.

Jeb Bush favors building a new US base in Iraq's al-Anbar province, and has said that some US troops ought to be embedded with Iraqi armed forces to help train them and identify targets as joint terminal attack controllers.

Jeb Bush has not commented on adding to the approximately 3,500 US troops in Iraq now.

Jeb Bush later clarified that he was referring to policy on Israel, rather than on the Middle East as a whole.

Jeb Bush has called the April 2015 Iran nuclear deal framework a "horrific deal" and said he would likely terminate any final agreement should he become president.

Jeb Bush has argued that the deal would put Iran into a position where it could intimidate the Middle East.

Jeb Bush supported President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

Jeb Bush "volunteered time to assist the Miami Children's Hospital, the United Way of Dade County and the Dade County Homeless Trust".

Jeb Bush served from 2012 to 2015 as co-chair of the Barbara Jeb Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.

Jeb Bush has worked with The James Madison Institute, a free market public policy think tank based in Tallahassee, Florida.

Jeb Bush helped the institute in numerous ways and still has his think tank working in conjunction with it.

Jeb Bush subsequently wrote the foreword to another book, published by the conservative Heritage Foundation and written by Nina Shokraii Rees, School Choice 2000: What's Happening in the States.

Jeb Bush co-founded the first charter school in the State of Florida: Liberty City Charter School, a grades K-6 elementary school.

In 2000, Jeb Bush established the Points of Light program to recognize an "exemplary volunteer, organization, or person".

Jeb Bush first became involved in the benefit after meeting with committee member Lawson Dutton, whose child suffered from cystic fibrosis.

Noelle Lucila Jeb Bush was born on 1977 and is his only daughter.

Jeb Bush has four grandchildren, two through his elder son, and two through his younger son.