THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

No matter how well he does elsewhere, he knows he will be judged a failure if he can't snow the geezers and swamp people in Florida one more time. With that in mind, he is being extra diligent in his home state.

The plan, code-named “Homeland Security,” seeks to try to neutralize two potentially grave but homegrown threats to Mr. Bush’s long-anticipated run for president: the likely challenge from a charismatic young Republican senator from Miami, Marco Rubio, who is expected to seek the Republican nomination himself, and a demographic drift within Florida that could doom Mr. Bush there in a fall campaign against a Democrat.

The Bush effort in Florida, where Barack Obama prevailed in the last two elections, will pour enormous resources and energy over the next year into a state that many thought Mr. Bush, its governor from 1999 to 2007, would be able to count on as a bedrock of support.

“Without Florida,” said Bob Martinez, a longtime Bush friend and a former governor of Florida himself, “he knows it would be hard to make the numbers work.”

In what advisers said could amount to a $50 million undertaking by Election Day, Mr. Bush and his team are rushing to lock up Florida’s best-known political operatives, elected officials and campaign donors — offering them contracts, face time and blandishments, according to those who know of the tactics.

Their forceful message to the state’s top campaign minds: “Keep your schedules clear,” said Dan Dawson, a Republican operative in Jacksonville who specializes in digital strategy and may work with Mr. Bush.

Mr. Bush’s muscular outreach in Florida — where actions like a tribute to an aide at his deathbed and staff reunions at Disney World have won the admiration of Republican leaders — is relying on a highly personal touch and the tug of loyalty to a man who ushered in what has been a 17-year stretch of Republican state government.

He put them on the gravy train, that train had better stop at his station.