Mother Jones
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It was Jeb Bush’s first campaign. In 1994, the 41-year-old son of the former president was the Republican nominee challenging Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles. The race was close, with several political handicappers predicting Bush would dethrone Chiles. Then in the final days, Bush released what his campaign considered to be a game-changing ad. The TV spot featured a Florida woman named Wendy Nelson, who happened to be a Bush campaign volunteer. Fourteen years earlier, her 10-year-old daughter had been kidnapped on her way to school and then murdered. Her murderer was apprehended and in 1981 sentenced to die. Yet all these years later, he remained on death row. In the Bush ad, Nelson said, “Her killer is still on death row, and we’re still waiting for justice. We won’t get it from Lawton Chiles because he’s too liberal on crime.”
The ad ignited a firestorm. Chiles and his camp decried Bush for brazenly exploiting this horrific crime, noting that a previous governor had signed a death warrant for the murderer (but an appeal was pending) and that on Chiles’ watch as many convicted killers had been executed as had been put to death during the stints of previous Republican and Democratic governors (eight or nine a term). Chiles’ team also noted that he had moved to expedite the death penalty appeals process.
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Watch Jeb Bush Defend a Campaign Ad That Exploited the Murder of a 10-Year-Old Girl
