Why did Kasich run to the left of the GOP in the primaries?

[darklordoftech]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/11/john-kasichs-campaign-makes-no-sense-the-ohio-governor-is-following-a-losing-strategy-that-hurts-the-republican-partys-most-viable-establishment-candidates.amp

Why did he take this approach rather than running as the true conservative he was throughout his career?

[kwabbit]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/11/john-kasichs-campaign-makes-no-sense-the-ohio-governor-is-following-a-losing-strategy-that-hurts-the-republican-partys-most-viable-establishment-candidates.amp

Why did he take this approach rather than running as the true conservative he was throughout his career?

He needed an angle. There was a glut of standard conservative candidates already, much of which were supporting Cruz. Kasich is pretty boring, so he wouldn't have stood out among that group. Trump was sucking up a lot of the non-movement conservative vote. Kasich's best option was probably to take the civil, bipartisan moderate angle. It wasn't 100% sincere, but he played the part well. There was just not enough demand for that in the GOP.

In the end, he didn't win the nomination, but he got 3rd out of 20 candidates while having little media hype around him, so it a pretty good strategy.

[darklordoftech]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/11/john-kasichs-campaign-makes-no-sense-the-ohio-governor-is-following-a-losing-strategy-that-hurts-the-republican-partys-most-viable-establishment-candidates.amp

Why did he take this approach rather than running as the true conservative he was throughout his career?

He needed an angle. There was a glut of standard conservative candidates already, much of which were supporting Cruz. Kasich is pretty boring, so he wouldn't have stood out among that group. Trump was sucking up a lot of the non-movement conservative vote. Kasich's best option was probably to take the civil, bipartisan moderate angle. It wasn't 100% sincere, but he played the part well. There was just not enough demand for that in the GOP.

In the end, he didn't win the nomination, but he got 3rd out of 20 candidates while having little media hype around him, so it a pretty good strategy.

If I was Kasich, I would have ran on having wrote the welfare reform bill.

[kwabbit]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/11/john-kasichs-campaign-makes-no-sense-the-ohio-governor-is-following-a-losing-strategy-that-hurts-the-republican-partys-most-viable-establishment-candidates.amp

Why did he take this approach rather than running as the true conservative he was throughout his career?

He needed an angle. There was a glut of standard conservative candidates already, much of which were supporting Cruz. Kasich is pretty boring, so he wouldn't have stood out among that group. Trump was sucking up a lot of the non-movement conservative vote. Kasich's best option was probably to take the civil, bipartisan moderate angle. It wasn't 100% sincere, but he played the part well. There was just not enough demand for that in the GOP.

In the end, he didn't win the nomination, but he got 3rd out of 20 candidates while having little media hype around him, so it a pretty good strategy.

If I was Kasich, I would have ran on having wrote the welfare reform bill.

Although welfare reform is/was part of the GOP orthodoxy, I don't think that would've been persuasive to many voters. Only thinktank eggheads and the very wealthy really care about entitlement reform on its own, that would've been appealing to maybe 5% of the electorate.

[darklordoftech]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/11/john-kasichs-campaign-makes-no-sense-the-ohio-governor-is-following-a-losing-strategy-that-hurts-the-republican-partys-most-viable-establishment-candidates.amp

Why did he take this approach rather than running as the true conservative he was throughout his career?

He needed an angle. There was a glut of standard conservative candidates already, much of which were supporting Cruz. Kasich is pretty boring, so he wouldn't have stood out among that group. Trump was sucking up a lot of the non-movement conservative vote. Kasich's best option was probably to take the civil, bipartisan moderate angle. It wasn't 100% sincere, but he played the part well. There was just not enough demand for that in the GOP.

In the end, he didn't win the nomination, but he got 3rd out of 20 candidates while having little media hype around him, so it a pretty good strategy.

If I was Kasich, I would have ran on having wrote the welfare reform bill.

Although welfare reform is/was part of the GOP orthodoxy, I don't think that would've been persuasive to many voters. Only thinktank eggheads and the very wealthy really care about entitlement reform on its own, that would've been appealing to maybe 5% of the electorate.

Yet it was one of the main talking points of politicians in 1992-2000.

[Schiff for Senate]

I like how this thread so far has basically been like a conversation between one New Jersey Democrat and one New Jersey Republican.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Because after he agreed to support Obamacare in 2013, he had no chance at getting support from either the tea party or establishment wings. Its a shame cause he was right on that issue and he was a way better candidate then Jeb

[VPH]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/11/john-kasichs-campaign-makes-no-sense-the-ohio-governor-is-following-a-losing-strategy-that-hurts-the-republican-partys-most-viable-establishment-candidates.amp

Why did he take this approach rather than running as the true conservative he was throughout his career?

He needed an angle. There was a glut of standard conservative candidates already, much of which were supporting Cruz. Kasich is pretty boring, so he wouldn't have stood out among that group. Trump was sucking up a lot of the non-movement conservative vote. Kasich's best option was probably to take the civil, bipartisan moderate angle. It wasn't 100% sincere, but he played the part well. There was just not enough demand for that in the GOP.

In the end, he didn't win the nomination, but he got 3rd out of 20 candidates while having little media hype around him, so it a pretty good strategy.

If I was Kasich, I would have ran on having wrote the welfare reform bill.

Although welfare reform is/was part of the GOP orthodoxy, I don't think that would've been persuasive to many voters. Only thinktank eggheads and the very wealthy really care about entitlement reform on its own, that would've been appealing to maybe 5% of the electorate.

Yet it was one of the main talking points of politicians in 1992-2000.

Well that's the key. 1992-2000. The issue doesn't have the same salience as it used to.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

John Kasich listened to the wrong people basically. The same people who are running the Lincoln Project. You know the types of people who think that the GOP was not historically, "protectionist, nativist and isolationist etc", which as I recall was a ridiculous Kasich tweet a few years back (these people never studied the 19th century, or even as late as the 1940s. History began and ended in 1980 for them it seems).

The irony is Kasich was a talk radio host, had filled in for Rush at points and thus could have easily gone the route that Trump did and just crafted his campaign around satiating the dissatisfaction manifested by the talk radio listeners from 2013 to 2015. Of course as Governor, he was somewhat removed from this orbit, but it didn't have to be that way. If a real estate guy can put some trained killers on "talk radio duty" for two years and use that as the basis for his campaign message, a guy who literally filled in for Rush Limbaugh should have been able to do the same, just with more polish and less offensive excess.

His best path to the nomination was to do what Mitt Romney did and go hard line on immigration and combine this with a little economic populism/trade/war skepticism. He had a good score from NumbersUSA, he was out of Congress since 2001 and thus could take a more 1990s stance on foreign policy. He also had more of a middle class background and thus better able to pull this off.

He could have pre-empted Trump thus and inherited the "law and order conservative suburban types" that wanted a Mitt Romney style candidate but not an open borders one like John McCain or Marco Rubio (think suburban Atlanta, Charlotte etc). He also could have set the terms for how this was done, and avoided the rhetorical excess of Trump in doing so, while still achieving the same results.

Because after he agreed to support Obamacare in 2013, he had no chance at getting support from either the tea party or establishment wings. Its a shame cause he was right on that issue and he was a way better candidate then Jeb

Mitt Romney passed a health care law incorporating most of Obamacare's elements and Jan Brewer did the unthinkable, she defied Vladimir Illych Norquist and his anti-tax crusade in 2009. Both still got their nominations and Brewer was even mentioned as an "excite the base candidate" for 2016.

How? They understood what Republicans actually care about and nobody votes Republican because of taxes or because of health care. They vote Republican because of identitarian friction. This was true of White Flight suburbia in the 60s-80s and it is true of rural NCW Republicans in the 2000s and 2010s (as well as the remainder of those suburban areas above still controlled by the same demographics by that point).

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/11/john-kasichs-campaign-makes-no-sense-the-ohio-governor-is-following-a-losing-strategy-that-hurts-the-republican-partys-most-viable-establishment-candidates.amp

Why did he take this approach rather than running as the true conservative he was throughout his career?

He needed an angle. There was a glut of standard conservative candidates already, much of which were supporting Cruz. Kasich is pretty boring, so he wouldn't have stood out among that group. Trump was sucking up a lot of the non-movement conservative vote. Kasich's best option was probably to take the civil, bipartisan moderate angle. It wasn't 100% sincere, but he played the part well. There was just not enough demand for that in the GOP.

In the end, he didn't win the nomination, but he got 3rd out of 20 candidates while having little media hype around him, so it a pretty good strategy.

Kasich was "running" for President for most of the period of 2013 to 2015, way before Trump announced. Even after Trump announced, there were a lot of people that didn't take Trump seriously and until there was a collective and mutual "we are doing this" and his support started to take off.

There was plenty of time for another candidate to fill the vacuum created by all the establishment candidates putting their eggs into the basket of the 2012 autopsy.