Dulles, Va. — Five minutes after John Kasich was set to begin a press conference here in a private terminal at Dulles Airport, word came: His plane had not taken off from Ohio.
Kasich got on a plane set to fly from Columbus to Dulles this morning, according to a source close to the campaign. And then he got off. The delay was not because of weather or a plane malfunction, as irritated reporters awaiting the governor’s arrival assumed. After conversations with advisors, Kasich had reached a decision many had long seen coming: He would not continue his campaign for president.
“As I suspend my campaign today, I have renewed faith, deeper faith, that the Lord will show me the way forward and fulfill the purpose of my life,” Kasich said hours later, formally ending his campaign with a speech in Columbus.
Kasich is the last of 16 major Republican presidential candidates to make that decision this cycle. Much ink has been spilled explaining where and why the 15 before Kasich went wrong, and when the path finally became too narrow for them to remain in the race. But because the Ohio governor’s path was almost impossibly narrow to begin with, is exit raises a different question: Why did he stay in for as long as he did?
Kasich allies say that he saw himself as qualified, and that as long as there was hope of a contested convention, they believed he had a chance, however slim.
“Until it was evident that Donald Trump was going to get to 1,237, I think Kasich wanted to offer an alternative, and also somebody that could win in November,” says one source close to the Kasich campaign. “And I think if it had gone to a contested convention, I think the feeling was that among those folks that are delegates, the argument of putting forth the best person to win in November would have been a valid argument.”
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Those who know Kasich say that he felt he belonged in the race until the very end.
“I asked him one day if he would consider a veep spot, and he says, ‘No, it’s time for me to be president,” recalls Scott Keller, a Utah-based GOP donor who held fundraisers for several candidates, including Kasich.
In another year, Kasich might have been right. His resume — a hugely popular governor from perhaps the most important general-election swing state, a former congressman who could point to having actually balanced the federal budget — would be formidable in a normal cycle. But this was not a normal cycle.
In this, Kasich is like the 15 contenders who fell before him: He had the misfortune to run in the year of Trump, when presidential politics saw up become down and the blue sky turn green. But Kasich also suffered from a perception problem. Though he kept hitting all the marks his campaign set — a second-place finish in New Hampshire, a close second in Vermont, a close third in Michigan, a win in Ohio — it never seemed to matter. From the moment he entered the race with an odd, winding and, at times, baffling speech at the Ohio State University in Columbus last July, he could never quiet the derisive chatter from many Republicans that he was an also-ran, and later, a spoiler.
The dearth of resources made it hard for Kasich to get his message to voters.
From the start, Kasich’s choice to take Obamacare funding for the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid in his state made him simply unacceptable to many conservatives. His one-man band tour of New Hampshire, in which he stood before audience after audience with that singular slouch, telling dad jokes and preaching his own heartfelt, policy-heavy brand of conservatism, left many Republicans rolling their eyes. And even after he took second place there, rival campaigns continued to dismiss him, saying he had nowhere left to go.
Critics said Kasich’s continued presence after New Hampshire only served to hurt Marco Rubio, then the establishment favorite, because the two men attracted the same time of voter in similar districts. Republican leaders and other campaigns reportedly leaned on him to get out. At FiveThirtyEight, David Wasserman estimated that Rubio could have won 91 delegates by taking all of Kasich’s votes. The cost was particularly clear in Virginia, where Kasich split votes with Rubio in the highly educated, wealthy Washington, D.C. suburbs, helping to throw the statewide race to Trump.
It was a narrative that left Kasich allies spitting mad. Kasich, at least, had pulled off a strong second in New Hampshire, and an even closer second in Vermont. Rubio had fallen short of his campaign’s declared goals in every single state since Iowa. And as the March 15 primaries in Florida and Ohio approached, it became clear that Kasich at least had a chance to win his home state, while Rubio didn’t. Why should Kasich be the one who had to get out?
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But Kasich never had the money to form a deep, national organization like Cruz, Rubio, or Jeb Bush. Given its limited resources, his team made the calculation that he could survive between the New Hampshire primary in early February and the Ohio primary in mid-March without a significant win. But surviving and thriving are two different things: There was never quite enough money to sustain any momentum he generated.
March, which saw Kasich take Ohio in the biggest success of his campaign, was supposed to be the time when Kasich’s survival finally paid dividends. By the end of the month, he was one of just three candidates in the race. And yet despite a winnowed field, the money never showed up: He raised just $4.5 million in March, compared to Ted Cruz’s $12.5 million, and ended the month with just $1.2 million on-hand.
#share#The dearth of resources made it hard for Kasich to get his message to voters. The campaign’s most valuable resource, say many people in Kasich’s orbit, was the candidate himself. Despite his reputation for being ornery and difficult, in this campaign, he deemed himself the “prince of light and hope.” One advisor described him as campaigning to be “hugger-in-chief.” And his warm-and-fuzzy style of campaigning earned him converts — when he could get in front of people, He is self-deprecating, and his dorky humor endeared him to voters. He ate his way through New Hampshire — and every state after that — scheduling lunchtime campaign stops at diners and restaurants, then getting grumpy with the reporters who crowded around to watch him talk on his flip phone and order a second bowl of mushroom and barley soup. It may have been on the schedule as a campaign stop, but, aides said, Kasich just wanted to eat lunch.
He waxed rhapsodic about the dark-chocolate nonpareils (“you don’t find these just anywhere”) in a northern New Hampshire candy store. He talked about riding his motorcycle to work as a state legislator outside a museum of police motorcycles, and once told National Review that House leadership hadn’t loved it when he’d worn his high-top Chuck Taylor’s around as a congressman. He marveled that moose could keep their heads up with antlers so big, and expressed joy at the most mundane parts of campaigning, like the discovery that he was on C-SPAN.
In New Hampshire, he held over 100 town halls en route to second place. There were moments, says the source close to the campaign, especially in some of the Midwestern states around Ohio, when “you could see he was picking up some steam, but they didn’t have the air cover or bandwidth to support the opportunity.”
As the other contenders in his “lane” exited the race one-by-one, Kasich, at least on paper, was left as the establishment’s lone standard-bearer. But the support simply never came; anti-Trump Republicans chose to bet on Cruz instead.
“I felt a couple times we were on the brink of having a breakthrough and moving beyond our lane, but other people stayed in the race, just like we stayed in the race, and we were never able to gather quite enough fundraising to push our message any way other than through his individual efforts,” says Tom Rath, a senior advisor to the campaign.
In part, resistance to that idea came from Kasich himself. The governor and his allies consistently pushed back on any characterization of him as an “establishment” candidate, arguing that he has been a thorn in the so-called establishment’s side his entire career. That resistance was on display late Tuesday night, when Kasich’s campaign staff pushed back hard on RNC chairman Reince Priebus’s declaration that Trump was now the party’s nominee.
The argument that Kasich had a path to the nomination was always a tough one to make. In the days leading up to his victory in Ohio, he openly acknowleged to reporters that he could only win the nomination in a multi-ballot contested convention. A little more than a month later, his allies began saying his opening would not come until a third or fourth ballot in Cleveland.
That scenario was a hard sell for a party in the midst of a bitter internal war, and in the past two weeks many Republicans made clear that they were not interested in contemplating it. When Kasich’s senior staff descended on the RNC meeting in Florida late last month to try to woo members, all of whom will be delegates to the convention in July, they realized “there was no appetite in this party for a contested convention,” says Rath, who flew down to press the case. One week later, when Trump demolished Cruz and Kasich up and down the east coast, winning more than 50 percent of the vote in each of five states, it was clear that appetite had lessened even further.
#related#“What happened after the Acela primary was there was more and more of an acceptance, not just among political people but among the donor class: This is what the thing was gonna be,” Rath says.
Kasich’s allies had seen the writing on the wall several days ago, but were willing to stick by him until he made the decision for himself.
In August, with Trump atop the polls, much to the befuddlement of the political class, one GOP strategist quoted the Cole Porter song, ‘Just One of Those Things,’ to explain why the front-runner wasn’t factoring into their planning:
If we’d thought a bit, ‘bout the end of it, when we started painting the town. We’d have been aware that our love affair was too hot not to cool down.
But the GOP electorate’s fling with Trump never cooled off. As of this afternoon, he will be the last man standing, and the presumptive Republican nominee.
Editor’s Note: This piece has been updated since its initial publication.
— Alexis Levinson is the senior political reporter for National Review.