“Jeb Bush’s laser focus on fundraising has sent him crisscrossing the country over the past six months to headline roughly 70 money events as he tries to smash existing presidential campaign records,” Politico reports.

“Rarely taking off more than a day or two off the money chase, Bush has held fundraisers in at least 15 different states and Puerto Rico, with event tickets ranging from $25 to $100,000 per person… The full-court press is a key component of his campaign strategy to shut out potential rivals from megadonors, cement himself as the Republican establishment candidate and create the most ambitious presidential fundraising operation in history — all before even announcing his White House bid.”

Jeb Bush “might still take exactly this path to the nomination. But the striking — and surprising — thing about his candidacy is that he will formally enter the race Monday bearing many of the costs of the center-right approach without seeming to enjoy many of the benefits,” the New York Times reports.

“He has not won the invisible primary, the behind-the-scenes competition for elite support that often decides the nomination, and he has not even emerged as a favorite of the party’s large block of more moderate voters. He starts in a weaker position than not only his brother in 1999 or his father in 1987, but also Mitt Romney in 2011.”

Jeb Bush “will enter a presidential contest — unruly in size, unyielding in pace and voracious in cost — that is unlike any faced by his father, George Bush, who won the office in 1988, or his brother, George W. Bush, who claimed it in 2000,” the New York Times reports.

“And as the third member of his family to seek the nation’s highest office, he brings to the race a last name that at once burnishes and tarnishes, evoking the nobility of public service and a deep distrust of political entitlement. Mr. Bush’s campaign will highlight that tension on Monday with the selection of a spare logo, first used in his failed 1994 race for governor, that excludes his surname. It reads simply Jeb!”

Politico: ” Jeb Bush isn’t a fresh face. The conservative base isn’t enamored of him. And his family name isn’t necessarily an asset… That leaves Bush with one straightforward path to the GOP nomination: an argument based on his durability and electability.”

Jeb Bush told CNN that he believes he’ll be in a better position to break away from the rest of the Republican field when he announces his presidential candidacy.

Said Bush: “People make up their minds in the last weeks of these primaries. My expectation is we’ll have slow, steady progress. That’s been the expectation all along.”

Jeb Bush “may not be nearly as strong in Florida as his reputation suggests. A Bloomberg Politics study conducted with University of Florida political scientist Daniel A. Smith found that nearly three-quarters of Florida’s 12.9 million currently registered voters have never even seen Bush’s name on a ballot.”

“By contrast, 92 percent of Floridians who voted when Marco Rubio was last on the ballot, in 2010, are still registered.”