CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Day two of our ongoing series previewing the five major Presidential candidates takes us from the insurgency of Vermont Senator and Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders to one of West Virginia’s neighbors to meet it’s popular two term Governor.
Governor John Kasich has served as both a Congressman and a Governor in his career, chiefly focused on balancing the federal budget. He spent some years out of politics after 2000 and worked at Lehman Brothers before the company went under in the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008 that precipitated The Great Recession.
Kasich returned to politics to run for Governor in Ohio–defeating incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland in a tightly contested race in 2010. He won re-election in 2014 in landslide fashion by earning 64 percent of the vote.
As Governor of Ohio, Kasich has taken a lot of credit for the start of an economic turnaround, which has included the creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Experts disagree on how much credit is owed to Kasich, because much of his influence in tax and budget reform is unlikely to be felt–positively or negatively–in the short-term.
Governor Kasich has drawn praise from conservatives for his pro-life stances and rightward shift on gun policy, but on the issues of immigration, health care, and climate change has sometimes broken with the party line.
Kasich emerged from the crowded field of 17 as one of the last candidates remaining, but it hasn’t been enough to overtake billionaire Donald Trump or conservative firebrand Ted Cruz. With only one state-wide victory under his belt–in his home state of Ohio, no less–Kasich’s plan is to stop Donald Trump from reaching the Republican Convention in Cleveland this July with the necessary 1237 pledged delegates.
That’s a feat that looked almost certain at the beginning of April, but April was unkind to the #NeverTrump movement. The month of May might not be any kinder.
A dreaded RINO?
Some see it as a bit of surprise that Kasich even needs to resort to the party insider tactics of trying to win a contested convention. Hancock County native George Gerbo considers Kasich a “compassionate conservative,” and sees Kasich as the party’s best chance to win in the general election.
“Conservatism is for limited government, yes,” Gerbo said. “But we also care about people, and I think that has been lost in the last couple of years of this, what I would call, extremism.”
Many consider Kasich to be a true conservative, but he’s been willing to break from party dogma in the past. He considered it his duty, alluding partially to his religious beliefs, to accept federal money to expand Medicaid in Ohio as part of his quest to better balance Ohio’s budget.
“Kasich is no moderate,” Greg Noone, Political Science and Law Professor at Fairmont State University and Director of FSU’s National Security Intelligence Program, said. “Kasich is a true blue conservative. The Republican Party should be very happy to nominate John Kasich.”
That hasn’t been the case though. Among Donald Trump, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Kasich, the Ohio Governor has only earned about 15 percent of the vote. He’s won just a single state, and he trails Senator Rubio in pledged delegates despite Rubio dropping out of the race in mid-March.
While the majority of the GOP has rejected Kasich thus far, Greg Noone said it’s unfair to call Governor Kasich a “Republican in Name Only.”
“If you look at his record, and he’s got a long record from Congress to the Governor’s mansion in Ohio, he would be the best candidate,” Noone said.
That record includes supporting the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. He has referred to himself as one of the “chief architects” of that agreement–which fact-checking publication Politifact rated as “Mostly True.” Kasich has also gone on record as supporting a Convention of States in an effort to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
That’s where economist John Deskins, Director of the WVU Bureau of Business & Economic Research, said he differs from Kasich.
“He’s moderate among the people who are there now, but in the grand scheme I don’t think he is,” Deskins said. “I mean, he’s arguing for a Balanced Budget Amendment.”
Deskins maintains that one of the keys of sound economic policy is never rocking the boat too much one way (taxes) or the other (spending cuts), but rather finding an appropriate balance for the two that doesn’t hinder growth.
“A Balanced Budget Amendment would do too much to raise taxes and/or cut government spending,” he said. “I think a Balanced Budget Amendment would be counterproductive. I think we need the flexibility to run deficits during economic downturns.”
The three remaining major Republican candidates have each proposed tax plans that offer large, across-the-board tax cuts, but don’t say if or where spending will be cut.
“I understand where both sides are coming from, and I really want to see a balance myself in public policy,” Deskins said. “But this is not the year of the moderate.”
Waiting for the crowd to thin
“Ted Cruz, even before he was a candidate, lost me when he essentially engineered the government shutdown,” George Gerbo said.
When the race began, Gerbo had Kasich among his first tier of candidates he could see himself supporting. But as the large field of 17 began to narrow down, Kasich became the last candidate standing that George could see himself rallying behind.
But the candidate that had Gerbo really curious at first was then-long shot and current front-runner Donald Trump. Gerbo wanted to hear what Mr. Trump had to say at first, but it didn’t take long for him to realize that he simply wouldn’t be able to cast a vote for Donald Trump in a Presidential election.
“I’m still waiting for any kind of concrete policy objectives or beliefs in any aspect of our nation’s government,” Gerbo said in reference to the Trump campaign.
“For my opinion, you can’t just say things and not have any kind of road map to get there.”
And that’s one of the many things that brought Gerbo to support Kasich. While he felt that Donald Trump and Senator Cruz offered vague platitudes at best and unfeasible proposals at worst, he saw Governor Kasich’s success with job creation in post-Great Recession Ohio and his long history of supporting and practicing conservative economic principles and was sold.
“I think John Kasich on the economy backs up better than anyone else in the field mainly because, as a chief executive in the state of Ohio, he has had unprecedented job growth in that state at a time when the rest of that region is seeing a decrease in population,” Gerbo said.
Gerbo also sees Kasich as the most electable candidate in the November general race, and Greg Noone agrees with him. However, Noone said it’s probably too late for Kasich to win the nomination without doing serious damage to GOP turnout on Election Day.
“We’re so far down the road now that you have the Trump folk and the Cruz folk that I don’t know that if you give it to anyone other than Cruz or Trump, I think so much of the electorate stays home,” Noone said.
“You need that conservative base [or] that liberal base, and if they stay home then the math becomes impossible.”
Though general election and state-by-state polling is generally inaccurate in April of an election year, Kasich is the only remaining Republican candidate that has polled consistently better than presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Could Kasich be benefiting, like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), from the perceived unpopularity of his opponents? Noone thinks it’s possible. Illusion or not, he thinks Kasich is the best GOP candidate in a general election.
“My personal opinion is that Kasich would have been the best candidate all along,” Noone said. “And I think Kasich is trying to demonstrate that he is the adult in the room.”
An identity lost?
“Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party was a party of optimism–the proverbial shining city on a hill, that our greatest days are still in front of us,” George said. “And you hear these guys say that now, and personally, I think this is where a lot of the anger comes from. A lot of people don’t feel that our greatest days are ahead of us.”
Gerbo is not a registered Republican in West Virginia, but he identifies more with the GOP than he does with any other party. Lately, he feels like the party has lost not only it’s way, but also it’s identity. He has labeled the party as one dominated by obstructionism since President Obama assumed office in 2008. He wants the party of the 1990s to return–or in his words, a party of solutions.
“Do we want to actually have an identity as a party?” he said. “The Republican Party does not know what it’s identity is, and this soul searching has gone on for eight months now and nobody can seem to find the soul of the Republican Party.”
Four years ago or eight years ago or twelve years ago, Kasich might have been a front runner for the nomination. That hasn’t been the case in 2016. Now his Presidential aspirations rest on whether or not he and Senator Cruz can win enough delegates to stop Donald Trump from hitting the magic number of 1237 before the July convention or before the first ballot.
In many ways, that strategy relies on Tuesday’s primary in Indiana. A Cruz win isn’t out of the question, but most forecasts show a Trump victory. Trump would walk away with at least 30 delegates–and three delegates for each Congressional District he wins.
Trump has won more than 90 percent of the pledged delegates since April 19. Kasich supporters, like George Gerbo, can only hope that a tactical vote for Cruz in Indiana on Tuesday keeps the dream of an open convention alive–because it’s their only shot at propping Kasich up as the identity and face of the GOP in 2016.