By this time in 1999, John Kasich had already ended his bid for the White House.
Kasich, the governor of Ohio, will on Tuesday become the 16th – and supposedly final – Republican to enter the presidential race, 16 years after he last ran.
In the 2000 election cycle, Kasich jumped in early, on the strength of his reputation as a chairman of the House budget committee who had actually managed to balance the budget. But, overwhelmed by the superior fundraising and name recognition of a candidate named Bush, Kasich dropped out on 14 July 1999.
He left Congress a couple years later to pursue a career at Lehman Brothers before jumping back into politics with a successful run at the Ohio governor’s mansion. His popularity in that role – he was re-elected last year with 64% of the vote – has once again brought the White House within view.
There just happen to be 14 men and one woman in line ahead of him.
In his belated grab for staffers and donors, Kasich may suffer from not having previously locked in the support of major GOP rainmakers, including the Koch brothers, who stopped inviting him to their events after a 2013 episode in which he got into an argument with Randy Kendrick, the wife of the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Kendrick attacked Kasich’s decision to extend Medicaid coverage to 300,000 Ohioans under the president’s signature healthcare law. “I don’t know about you, lady,” Kasich was reported by Politico to have said. “But when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor.”
It is a story sure to endear Kasich to moderate Republicans and Democrats – but he has to get on the ballot first. And the anecdote captures factors, apart from his tardiness, that could hurt his chances. While Kasich’s policies may bespeak empathy, his tone frequently does not. And while he ended Ohio’s estate tax and confronted its public-sector unions as governor, his reputation as a conservative may not pass muster in an age of unforgiving rightwing purity tests.
Kasich’s status as a former employee at a bank synonymous with capitalist overreach could be an added vulnerability in a populist election cycle.
To Kasich’s credit will be his enviable electoral record. He was re-elected as governor of Ohio, a must-win for Republican presidential candidates, with 64% of the vote last year. Before that, Ohio’s 12th district sent him to Congress nine times in a row. His only campaign that ever has failed was his previous White House run.
The governor has made repeated visits this year as an undeclared candidate to the early-voting state of New Hampshire, where his blunt speech could play as a political asset. But the first Republican debate is less than three weeks away, and only the top 10 candidates, as measured by voter polling, will qualify.
Here, too, Kasich has some catching up to do. Polling averages show him with 1.7% support, not only out of the top 10 but behind other candidates excluded from that group, including Rick Santorum, who won 11 primaries and caucuses in the 2012 Republican nominating race.
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told the Columbus Dispatch that “the train’s leaving” for Kasich.
“He has a good case to make and a good story to tell, but he’s going to have to make that case aggressively and tell the story quickly because the train’s leaving the station because of the debates,” Sabato said, “… and right now he’s nowhere man.”
