Right-leaning Super PACs have the potential to meaningfully shift public opinion. That potential is being wasted – along with an untold number of dollars.

Living in the Boston television market, I have lost track of the number of pro-Jeb Bush Super PAC ads I have seen. They don’t seem to have done much to improve Bush’s numbers in New Hampshire (southern New Hampshire is part of the Boston market.)

Maybe Jeb Bush is so disconnected from the concerns of contemporary Republican voters that no commercial is going to help him. The ads aren’t very good either. This ad is trying to make Bush come across as passionate, but he mostly seems like an upset hen. They couldn’t find a more flattering clip?

A bigger and more enduring issue than the atmospherics is the message. Bush’s record as governor should be a selling point, but it just doesn’t work. The ad doesn’t connect his record to today’s concerns. If the viewer knew how much Bush proposed to cut taxes on workers, it would make more sense when he mentions his record of cutting taxes in the past. Without the link to today’s concerns and a comprehensible forward-looking agenda, the stuff about his Florida record is just what every Republican seems to say. I don’t think people even hear it anymore whenever a Republican establishment candidate talks about how much they cut taxes in the not-especially-recent past.

While Right To Rise is wasting the money of establishment donors in a seemingly futile effort to revive Bush’s fortunes, the Carson campaign’s fundraising operation seems designed to raise money for the purpose of… raising more money. As someone on twitter pointed out, by the time Carson’s campaign flames out, his (mostly small donors) will have given around $80 million and the donors will have nothing to show for it all. The consultants will have lucrative lists of fundraising contacts and bigger houses.

Part of the problem is the decadent Republican consultant class, but let’s put that aside for another day. Even if we had more honest consultants who were more in touch with contemporary America, the donors – both the wealth establishment donors and the struggling, populist small donors – are going about it all wrong.

Both the establishment and the populists are victims of a savior mentality. They think that if they can convince the Republican electorate to nominate just the right candidate, then everything will turn out fine.

Well, it won’t torn out fine. It won’t be fine because, for an ever-expanding fraction of the electorate, any Republican presidential candidate is going to be a greedy sexist who hates minorities. Yes, even Ben Carson. These voters never hear a good thing about what conservatives believe, and never hear about the worst things that liberals support. That means they aren’t ready to listen to any Republican presidential candidate when it is election time.

If establishment Republican donors really cared about better governance and fiscal responsibility, they would have invested in explaining why right-leaning health care reform could provided secure, affordable coverage for working people with less cost and intrusion than Obamacare.

If social conservatives really wanted to advance their cause, the $80 million that will have gone to assorted Carson-branded outfits could have gone to publicizing Obama’s shameful vote to deny legal protections to newborns who survived botched abortions. Social conservatives will have donated an enormous sum of money and, at the end of it, it is possible that not even one more American will have learned anything about the abortion extremism of the national Democratic Party. This is epic futility.

Conservative donors – both big and small – would be better off recognizing that their target is the mass of Americans who are not especially interested in politics, and who do not consume conservative media like talk radio and Fox News. The media these people consume will tell them all about the gaffes of whoever the Republicans nominate. It will never tell them about the best conservative ideas or the worst of liberalism’s ideological excesses. That it our job. We need to tell them about those things long before we nominate presidential candidates. The failure to reach these voters – the delusion that nominating a Bush, a Rubio, or a Carson is all we need to do to reach these voters – is why the right-leaning Super PACs are wasting donor money, and why conservatives are losing the long game.