I wrote about Kasich for Politico today:
Kasich must hold the record for the most finishes of 4 percent or below of any candidate who has persisted in saying that he expects to be his party’s nominee. He is the Harold Stassen of primary-season futility. Kasich has limped in at roughly 4 percent or lower in Alaska (4.07 percent), Alabama (4.43 percent), Arkansas (3.71 percent), Iowa (1.86 percent), Nevada (3.6 percent), Oklahoma (3.59 percent), and Texas (4.25 percent).
The contests that he has done best in, besides his home state, are Vermont, where he finished a close second to Trump and got eight delegates, and the District of Columbia, where he finished second behind Marco Rubio and got nine delegates. This is not exactly an electoral juggernaut.
In New Hampshire, Kasich finished a very distant second at 16 percent after doing more than 100 town halls. (His modest take on getting blown out slightly less badly by Trump than everyone else in the race: “Tonight, the light overcame the darkness.”) This was less than Jon Huntsman got in New Hampshire in 2012, before appropriately dropping out a week later.
Kasich’s finish on Western Tuesday would have been enough to embarrass any lesser mortal out of the race.
In Arizona, he finished in fourth place in a three-man race, which sounds like a setup for a bad joke. Marco Rubio had won enough of the early vote that the anemic Kasich couldn’t catch him.
In Utah, Kasich bizarrely sought to keep Ted Cruz beneath 50 percent, the threshold for winning all of the state’s delegates. Instead, he succeeded only in holding Cruz below 70 percent, while he finished second — by 52 points.