One of the main talking points of the mainstream press about the Republican presidential race is the impending civil war between the party establishment and the rank and file and/or activist base. There is a lot of truth to this characterization as the success of an outlier candidate like Donald Trump or that of an insurgent like Ted Cruz attests. It remains to be seen whether any of the candidates not named Trump or Cruz can ultimately best them once the contest extends beyond the first states to vote. But if they cannot, then the GOP will be faced with an existential question that revolves around whether the vast party core of moderate conservatives that do not currently support either man will make their peace with either man as the nominee. The same kind of question will have to be asked if one of the more moderate alternatives ultimately prevails, and Republicans will have to wonder whether Trump and Cruz supporters will back someone else against the Democrats.

These questions are ones to which we won’t have an answer for several weeks if not months. But with only a few weeks to go before Iowa votes, there is another query that we can begin to consider that concerns the most well known of the candidates not named Trump or Cruz. If, as appears painfully obvious to anyone other than the members of his inner circle, Jeb Bush’s well-funded campaign is headed for an epic collapse, it’s fair to ask whether he and his famous family really want a kamikaze run by the former Florida governor to be part of their legacy.

To speak of anything that might happen in Iowa and New Hampshire as a foregone conclusion may be unfair. Voters in these states, especially New Hampshire, the one primary on which he has staked his candidacy, tend to decide late in the process. The polls may be inaccurate. The Real Clear Politics average of national polls shows him in sixth place with only 3.8 percent, but that result can be dismissed as meaningless by those who point out that the state polls are more important right now. Pro-Bush optimists can point to his standing in New Hampshire where he is also in sixth place in the RCP average. But they can say that he is less than 5 points away from the second place spot occupied by Marco Rubio. Moreover, Bush still has an immense campaign war chest and can afford to blitz voters there with ads throughout the coming weeks.

But if there is any one candidate we can safely consider unlikely to mount a comeback, it is Bush. Bush is unlike any of the others that still harbor hopes of an upset. Less well-known candidates still think that in the homestretch voters will get to know them and embrace their cause. Bush’s problem is just the opposite. Virtually everyone knows him and his name and, if he is languishing in the polls, it is not because he hasn’t gotten his message out yet but because it has already been rejected. With only four percent in the most recent New Hampshire poll from Monmouth University, it’s hard to see how he can overtake Rubio, John Kasich or Chris Christie — the competition for the moderate vote — let alone catch Trump (who is at 32 percent) and make good on his vow to win the primary.

Moreover, the bad news for Bush isn’t limited to his raw numbers. If you drill down into the details of the survey, you see that he is now the candidate with the worst favorability rating as well as a shrinking total of voters that regard him as their second choice for the nomination.

Considering that Bush is among the most mild-mannered and thoughtful of politicians in a field full of difficult personalities, that is an astonishing result. Coming into the race, we knew he had to bear the burden of his family name and absorb criticisms from those who believed the nation didn’t need a third President Bush. But Jeb thought his likability and reputation as a policy wonk would overcome that problem.

But Bush’s image has changed in the last few months. He became visibly frustrated with his failure to fend off jibes from Trump. Even more important, his resentment about the rise of his former protégé Rubio is just as obvious. Thus, just when he should have been counting on his good name to rescue a floundering campaign, Bush succumbed to the dark side of the force and went very negative. While his attempts to deal with Trump’s bullying at the debates were ineffectual and got bad reviews, his attacks on Rubio are where he has put most of his resources as he flooded the airwaves with ads that depict the senator as an absentee dilettante in Congress. Right now the keynote of his campaign is not so much a celebration of a man with a lot of deep thoughts about policy as it is an all-out effort to slime Rubio.

Will it work? It might. Anyone who underestimates the power of negative advertising hasn’t been paying attention to American political history. But Sinking Rubio isn’t going to make voters like Jeb again. To the contrary, his negative approach is undermining the already slender case for him and causing his polls and favorability to decline. Yet it might allow Kasich or Christie to finish second in New Hampshire, and thus claim the title of the winner of the mythical moderate primary. But right now the only thing Bush seems to be accomplishing is to sabotage the one non-Trump or non-Cruz candidate other than Bush that has the resources and the campaign infrastructure to wage a national campaign after Iowa and New Hampshire are finished. If so, then rather than carry the banner of the party establishment in this great crusade to save the GOP from the clutches of Trump and Cruz, all Bush will have done is to ensure that one of them will be the nominee.

The Bushes may be the closest thing to a Republican royal family and stem from staid New England roots. But as the first President Bush’s savaging of Michael Dukakis in 1988 and George W. Bush’s hit job on John McCain in 2000 remind us, they are tough political warriors. The word quit isn’t in their vocabulary, and that’s why Bush family retainers are rallying around Jeb even as he continues a campaign that threatens to be a flop for the history books in terms of the most money raised and expended to such little effect.

But whatever you might say about the Bushes, they are not saboteurs and have always been Republican team players. That’s why they should be thinking long and hard about whether they want Jeb’s final weeks in the race to resemble a suicide mission more than a quest for the presidency.

I’m not saying that reverting to a more positive approach would allow him to overtake the other moderates and rescue his candidacy. I don’t think anything can do that. But I do think that the Bush clan won’t want to have the last Bush campaign of this generation to become something for which they need to apologize.

I expect that after he loses New Hampshire, Bush will pull out of the race rather than prolong the agony of his loss and inspire even more mockery. But if he waits until then to stop undermining the chances of putting forward a viable alternative to Trump and Cruz, it will be too late. It’s time for Jeb to stop helping the very people he and his supporters want to stop. If he doesn’t, his legacy won’t be just an ill-advised presidential run but actions that actually worsened the GOP civil war and ultimately destroyed the party his family helped sustain for generations.