PORTLAND — Before you even get a good look at the man, you may notice his voice and its sing-songy, bouncy timbre that seems to make most sentences end with an exclamation point.

He was talking in April to a reporter about Maine’s slow economic growth rate while under the Fitzpatrick Stadium scoreboard before the Hearts of Pine home opener. He sported the soccer club’s original Woods & Waters kit, a Hearts scarf, blue jeans and aviators, but it’s the voice that stands out here.

“It’s devastating,” he said of Maine’s GDP growth. “It’s very tough to convince kids to— Ohhhhh! I don’t believe it! Speaking of entrepreneurial success!” A friend had just arrived.

He definitely does not have the Texas drawl of his cousin, George W. Bush. It’s closer to the formal, crisp style of his late Massachusetts-born uncle, George H.W. Bush, who famously had a family compound in Kennebunkport for decades.

Jonathan Bush’s voice is his own. After all, he calls himself “a new kind of Bush.”

And he is striving for something new this year, even if it’s not quite new for his family. The 57-year-old health technology entrepreneur has never sought public office. The one he wants is not as big as the White House that his relatives once occupied (“You couldn’t pay me to go to Washington,” he says), but it is Maine’s top seat: the Blaine House.

If he makes it out of a crowded Republican primary in June, he’ll have a shot in November to succeed Gov. Janet Mills and bring his famed family’s name back into political relevance after it faded in Texas and Florida.

But during his Maine gubernatorial run, the father of seven children has been intentional about telling voters he is not the same as his relatives.

Instead of going into politics, he cofounded the health tech platform athenahealth in the late 90s and brought more than 900 jobs years later to Belfast when he expanded the firm to the Midcoast city. Before that, he worked in consulting, spent a college break driving an ambulance in New Orleans and trained as a U.S. Army medic.

Like his relatives, who some Republican voters have soured on because of their criticism of President Donald Trump, the Cape Elizabeth resident has criticized Trump. But Bush is aware of the GOP’s turn since 2016. The TV and radio ads for his Maine gubernatorial bid include a spot on how “pro-MAGA” Republicans support his campaign.

Still, in a Republican Party that Trump dominates, the big question for Bush remains whether enough GOP primary voters will back a well-off businessman with his last name and past baggage: he stepped down from the company he founded and was embroiled in domestic violence incidents decades ago. Polling has suggested more of them prefer the flamethrowing Republican contender Bobby Charles, who, ironically, worked in both the George W. and George H.W. Bush administrations.

Bush is confident his business track record and his plans to cut income taxes by $1 billion, cut MaineCare spending and cut state government positions will win over voters.

At the soccer game, Bush talked about voters he’s met in places like Dover-Foxcroft, Houlton and South Paris. He described the “pretty extreme” emotions and anger he has heard from lower-income Mainers in rural towns. (There’s also a trace of his cousin’s “compassionate conservatism” as he speaks of wanting to maintain “our tradition of a lovely state in terms of our discourse.”)

He likened the economic despair he’s heard from voters to the feeling of being submerged in water.

“Every time I jump in the ocean, I know it’s going to be cold, but oooooh!” he exclaimed. “When you really feel it, it is raw and desperate.”

‘TO BE LOVED, YOU NEEDED TO BE USEFUL’

Jonathan James Bush was born March 10, 1969 to the late Jonathan James Bush and Josephine Colwell Bradley — sharing his father’s name. He grew up in Manhattan. Josephine was a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art at the time of her marriage to Jonathan, a banker who became a force in New York Republican politics.

Bush’s little brother Billy, who became a well-known TV and radio host, was born about two years later.

As a boy, Bush dreamed of growing up to become everything from a police officer to a tractor driver, with the latter aspiration coming when he got his first job in landscaping in Kennebunkport, the home of the Bush family’s summer compound, Walker’s Point.

He went to high school at the private Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1993 from Wesleyan University in Connecticut with a bachelor’s degree in social studies before earning an MBA from Harvard University in 1997.

He also took a break from Wesleyan to enlist in the Army as a medic during the Gulf War, doing boot camp in South Carolina. The war ended before he could be deployed.

Once he had his MBA, he began working for his father’s firm, which provided banking services to foreign embassies, before moving into healthcare. That work felt more and more like a calling, he said, and a way to make his family proud.

“Being a little Bush, growing up really felt like in order to be loved, you needed to be useful for the world,” he said.

He got to work on that. Bush and colleague Todd Park launched Athena Women’s Health in 1997 with the opening of a birthing center in San Diego. Their ambitions ran into financial difficulties, so they pivoted to creating an electronic medical billing service with help from Park’s brother. Then they expanded into patient communication, data management and other technology.

Athena Women’s Health became athenahealth, based in Watertown, Massachusetts. Bush would earn awards from various groups over the ensuing years for his leadership as president and CEO of the firm. His company opened its office in Belfast in 2008 after the Maine city’s largest employer, credit card lending giant MBNA, left.

A key factor in his company’s expansion to Maine was a tax incentive for companies in industries with high unemployment rates, a news article from the time said.

Bush held his gubernatorial campaign launch last year at the company’s Belfast office.

Things unraveled in 2018, when Bush resigned from athenahealth amid an activist investor takeover effort and a British tabloid reporting on Bush’s past domestic violence incidents with his ex-wife Sarah Selden before their 2006 divorce. The two have said they went on to successfully co-parent their five kids, and Selden said in a Bush campaign memo last year she supports his bid for governor.

His athenahealth tenure was not the last word on his healthcare career, as Bush founded Zus Health, a Boston-based health data platform for doctors and clinics, in 2020.

Bush, who now has two young kids in addition to five grown children, married his current wife, Fay Rotenberg, in 2018. She is also a healthcare executive whose family has deep roots in Maine.

He bought former gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler’s Cape Elizabeth home for $7.55 million and 2020 — before Cutler’s legal woes would begin — and says he has lived full-time there since 2021. (Some have cast doubt on his tenure in Maine; he registered to vote in Cape Elizabeth in October 2022.)

Bush said he didn’t think about running for elected office much in the past, but his healthcare leadership coupled with encouragement from friends helped plant an idea in his head. One of those friends, Hugh Reynolds, lives on Deer Isle not far from North Haven where Bush has spent summers.

Reynolds, who owns Stonington-based Greenhead Lobster, said Bush stands out as a “great listener” who wants to help remove the “obstructions” facing Maine’s heritage industry. Amid everything he has done in life and his family’s name, Bush is “very down to earth,” Reynolds said.

“He is the man, as far as I’m concerned,” Reynolds added.

‘OH, THE FIRING’

Bush got the ball rolling on his eventual foray into politics last year when he launched his Maine for Keeps podcast focused on the regulations he felt have hampered the state economy.

He launched his campaign in October and has zeroed in on a few big priorities — immediately cutting Maine income taxes by $1 billion annually, auditing MaineCare to help “shrink government healthcare” and slashing the state government workforce.

The income tax cut would apply to all of Maine’s income tax brackets, including the top rate of 9.15% that Mills and legislative Democrats bumped up by passing a “millionaire’s tax” this year. Bush says it would give the average family a roughly $2,000 break while attracting businesses to the state.

Questions over implementation still remain, but Bush has said his plan is more realistic than the $4 billion cut to the state budget that Charles has promised.

MaineCare, the state’s version of Medicaid that provides health coverage to low-income residents, has faced budget issues while expanding over the years to cover about 400,000 residents — about a third of Mainers. Trump and conservative allies have accused it of being rife with fraud while state audits have identified other potential issues.

Bush alluded in an April radio interview to the 2017 voter-approved Medicaid expansion and said Democrats were “suffocating the free market.” Ever one to use analogies, he likened Democrats’ management of healthcare to “(Russian President Vladimir ) Putin bombing the school and then coming in and declaring martial law.” Maine Democrats have repeatedly criticized his MaineCare remarks.

Bush said he would audit MaineCare “from top to bottom,” end contracts for underperforming providers, use AI and data to flag suspicious billing and end direct contracting models. He’d also repeal Maine’s “certificate of need” law and “fully legalize” community paramedicine to allow more Mainers to receive care at home — among other plans.

“That’s the bulk of what I think I’ll be doing for the first term, is just ripping through all of that, making it run like a tight, little Swiss watch,” Bush said.

On the state employee front, Bush said in a March radio interview that he planned to make deep cuts to the state’s 13,000-strong workforce.

“Oh, the firing. I can’t wait,” he said, noting he planned to terminate 1,500 to 2,000 workers within six months of his election. He described the move for those workers as “a promotion … into higher-paying jobs in the free market.”

A state employee, Bush added, is constrained in their current job but is actually “a marvelous person that God put on this earth to do marvelous things.”

Those ideas have opened up Bush to criticism from Democrats that he’s another businessman who thinks he could quickly change government without realizing the realities of Augusta. The State House has been controlled by Democrats since Mills took office in 2019.

But he’s bold and confident, supporters say, and he’s not afraid to critique Republicans, too. He’s also warned his party against supporting strict abortion limits. His flexibility on some issues makes Bush electable come November, allies say.

“He brings wherewithal and capacity to bring investment into this state,” said state Sen. Jim Libby, R-Standish, who is backing Bush’s campaign after ending his own gubernatorial bid amid Clean Election Act controversies. “And I think he has an ability to do it immediately.”

June will deliver the verdict on whether Maine Republicans trust Bush enough over others to win come November. Back at the Hearts of Pine home opener in April, Bush smiled when describing how when he’s not running around Cape Elizabeth or on the campaign trail, his two youngest kids, 7-year-old Willa and 5-year-old Jonny, keep him busy with T-ball, horse riding and other activities.

“I love Maine,” Bush said right before kickoff, as supporters were chanting in full voice. “I love this song. I love these people, and I don’t like that there’s despair about keeping kids here.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated on May 10 to correct information about whether Josephine Colwell Bradley has died. She is alive.