Jeb Bush announces he will not vote for Clinton nor Trump

By Philip Noble 9/30/16

Jeb Bush has reaffirmed that he will not vote for either major party candidate for president, and is suggesting that other voters do the same. The former GOP candidate said Thursday, “If everybody didn’t vote, that would be a pretty powerful political statement, wouldn’t it?”

Bush in May, declared on his Facebook page that Donald Trump did not have the temperament necessary to be President, and that Mr. Trump was not a true conservative. He went on to describe Hillary Clinton as an untrustworthy liberal whose presidency would amount to a third term of the Obama administration.

Mr. Bush did say that he would continue to support conservative candidates for office at the state and federal levels. He has denied reports that he encouraged guests at a private lunch in New York City to vote for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee for president, but has confirmed that he will vote in November. He has not publicly stated for whom he will cast his vote.

Mr. Bush’s latest remarks come on the heels of reports that his father, George H.W. Bush, would be voting for Hillary Clinton in the general election. Jeb Bush has criticized the media and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, for reporting on the remarks, saying they were made in private, and that airing them was inappropriate.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is the former Maryland lieutenant governor who’d attended a Points of Light event, and claimed in a Facebook post afterward that the elder George Bush told her he was voting for Clinton.