I've been like a lot of other people when it comes to John Kasich, talking about how he really needs to just get out of the race already because he's hopelessly behind (even now he's in fourth place behind Rubio in the delegate count) and hasn't won anywhere except his home state. In the meantime, anyone who believes as Kasich claims to that Donald Trump should not be the nominee should see that Kasich's continued candidacy is helping Trump by preventing those who share that sentiment from coalescing around Ted Cruz.
Why would stay in when you don't have a chance to be the nominee and you're helping Trump?
Because Kasich doesn't believe either of those things are true. When it comes to helping or hurting Trump, Kasich sees it like this: The goal is not so much to get another candidate to 1,237 via the primaries and caucuses, since that's not going to happen anyway, but to stop Trump from getting there. And to that end, any viable option who can pull votes away from Trump helps. That might have had some validity in New York, where Kasich as the second-place finisher did manage to pull a few delegates away from the runaway winner, while Cruz languished in last place and got none.
For the most part, I think Kasich's been the gift that keeps on giving for Trump but he doesn't see it that way.
But what about the larger matter of why a guy would stay in when he has no chance to be the nominee? And the answer is simple: Kasich believes he can be the nominee. And while that seems crazy if you look only at the delegate count to date, it's not really so crazy when you game out what might actually happen.
First, obviously no one but Trump has a chance at the nomination if we don't end up with a contested convention, because mathematically only Trump has a shot at the 1,237 pledged delegates needed to win on the first ballot. But if Trump falls short of that number and we end up with a contested convention, the subsequently released delegates can vote for whomever they want. Let's look at the totals to date:
Trump 845, Cruz 559, Rubio 171, Kasich 148
Cruz would have to pick up 688 delegates on the second ballot to secure the nomination. Kasich would obviously have a steeper climb, but if Kasich can lay the groundwork among party regulars that he is better positioned to beat Hillary, he might be able to create a scenario in which neither Trump nor Cruz can get to 1,237 on subsequent ballots and support starts to build for Kasich as the more electable alternative. In The Week, Damon Linker makes the case for why this makes sense for the GOP
I barely mentioned Kasich in that earlier column because no one in the party (besides, presumably, Kasich himself) seems to think he has any plausible path to the nomination. He's obviously not going to win 1,237 delegates outright. (He's currently at 149, which is 24 delegates behind Rubio, who dropped out on March 15.) Kasich is just as obviously not going to pull a Cruz and strong-arm roughly 1,000 delegates to switch over to him on a second ballot. (The better-funded and much more successful Cruz campaign is working like crazy to guarantee such a switch among just a few hundred delegates.) And unlike Trump with his alt-right populist foot soldiers, or Cruz with his backing from the party's true conservative true believers, Kasich appears not to enjoy enthusiastic support from any faction of his party outside of his home state of Ohio.
All of that is true and helps to explain why Kasich probably won't be the nominee.
What it doesn't explain is why he shouldn't be the nominee. Because the fact is that any argument in favor of Cruz getting the nod after the first ballot can be deployed in favor of Kasich prevailing instead. And since Kasich would undoubtedly be the stronger option to take on Hillary Clinton in the general election — Cruz loses to Clinton by two points inhead-to-head polls, while Kasich prevails by eight points and would most likely deliver Ohio's crucial electoral votes — it's unclear why the GOP would opt to go with Cruz if Trump fails on the first ballot.
So really: Why not Kasich?
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As you can see, Linker is not really predicting this will happen but he's arguing for why it should. I disagree with Linker's argument in two important ways: 1. Cruz is not an extremist. Just because the media have successfully sold that narrative doesn't make it true. 2. Kasich is not "undoubtedly" the strongest candidate to take on Hillary.
The only reason anyone has to think that is a few early polls, which tell us nothing about how the two would campaign against each other. Kasich's primary campaign has been woefully unimpressive, and his relatively better showing in a mythical general election matchup against Hillary reflects nothing more than the fact that negative media attention has been trained on Trump and Cruz and not on him. Let him become the nominee and that changes quickly. I also have my doubts about whether Kasich would really be willing to attack Hillary's weaknesses as a successful general election candidate would need to do.
But I think Kasich buys all of this, and he thinks he could actually pull it off in Cleveland. He seems very unlikely to succeed, but when you game it out like this, can you understand why he's not totally crazy to believe it's still worth going for?
I've been like a lot of other people when it comes to John Kasich, talking about how he really needs to just get out of the race already because he's hopelessly behind (even now he's in fourth place behind Rubio in the delegate count) and hasn't won anywhere except his home state. In the meantime, anyone who believes as Kasich claims to that Donald Trump should not be the nominee should see that Kasich's continued candidacy is helping Trump by preventing those who share that sentiment from coalescing around Ted Cruz.
Why would stay in when you don't have a chance to be the nominee and you're helping Trump?
