Ann Althouse this morning links to her son’s blog, Jaltcoh, which links to an article in Talking Points Memo, “Kasich: I May Go To Convention ‘With More Delegates Than Anybody Else’” which says,
“We’ll have one more to go this fall when we beat Hillary Clinton here because I’m in the best position to beat her and we’re going to get a lot of momentum. We have a lot of people now joining us who they were on the sidelines. They want to come now.”
Kasich won 66 delegates in Ohio’s winner-take-all-contest. Asked if he believed he could make it all the way to the convention if no candidate amassed the 1,237 delegates needed to win the GOP nomination outright, the Ohio governor’s response was optimistic.
“Oh, yeah, look, I may go to the convention before this is over with more delegates than anybody else,” Kasich said. “There’s 1,000 yet to pick.”
Back in the real world, Kasich won one state. And to win that state, he played spoiler in other states — presuming that his supporters would have chosen Cruz over Trump, that would have easily handed Cruz victories in Illinois and Missouri, where instead the winner-take-all nature of the elections allowed Trump to grow his delegate lead over Cruz. (Florida’s a different story anyway – no one had a chance.)
From here on out, the primaries and caucuses are increasingly winner-take-all (though I’m coming up empty trying to find a link that summarizes the nature of the contests), which means that every contest in which Kasich stays in, is another contest in which his chance of winning is remote, and the chance that gains a small share of the vote, and enables Trump to win is very strong — though, admittedly, at this point we’re now a bit blind, as we have no statewide polls to go on.
So:
Does Kasich truly believe that he has a strong chance at winning outside of Ohio, that he’ll gain Rubio’s voters and cruise past Cruz?
Is he simply so self-centered, so fixated on the possibility of becoming president that he doesn’t care about the risk, even strong likelihood that he’s giving Trump the victory in winner-take-all contests?
Does he simply think each of Cruz and Trump are as bad as the other, so it’s irrelevant which of them wins? Perhaps he is quite OK with a President Trump because of the operating assumption that his hard lines on immigration, trade, etc., will vanish and he’ll govern from the center or even the left if he makes it into office, and perhaps he doesn’t really care about Trump’s various disturbing statements but it’s all just moral posturing on his part.
And one further incidental comment: if either Rubio or Kasich had left before yesterday, they’d have had some negotiating power to promise Cruz they’d leave in return for some genuine say in a Cruz administration platform. Now they’re in a much weaker position, unless we make it to Cleveland without a majority-Trump delegate count.
Update: a liberal facebook friend shared an article, “Here’s a Long List Showing That Ted Cruz is As Bad As (If Not Worse Than) Donald Trump,” from a “progressive” website, which, while I don’t buy into their accusations, makes me think that the third of my possibilities above is the most likely, that those of us who object to Donald Trump in a principled manner are giving men like Kasich too much credit when they appear to do the same. If Kasich is pretty much indifferent as to whether Cruz or Trump ultimately take the nomination, if he doesn’t get it, it would explain his decision much better than delusion or vanity.
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