For a long time, the smart money was on John Kasich eating his last campaign-trail meal in a lobster joint on the New Hampshire coast sometime in February, in a scene that even the rookie reporters would have found dingy and sad. But he has endured well into the spring, through the Bronx portion of the Republican contest, obligingly swallowing a monumental portion of Arthur Avenue cured meats. At first, the Party’s professionals tended to look kindly on Kasich’s oddball, lo-fi campaign, because his basic personal decency was a helpful force in an angry primary, but in the past month his sheer endurance, the accumulation of all those meals, has become a problem for them. As long as Kasich stays in the race, he makes it harder for those opposed to Donald Trump to coalesce around a single candidate. The Times devoted a long story, last week, to the Cruz campaign’s mounting exasperation with Kasich’s decision to stay in the race, even though the Ohioan has won only his own state and has barely seemed to compete in much of the country. Cruz said, “Someone is not electable if they can’t get elected.”
And yet this agitation seems a little misdirected. It shouldn’t be a surprise that there is one Republican candidate who is not yet ready to cede the field to Trump and Cruz, whose politics, as recently as the last Presidential election, belonged to the fringe. As Jeb Bush abandoned the race, Mike Murphy, who ran his super PAC, lamented that there weren’t nearly as many traditional Republican voters as he had thought there would be. But, though their numbers are fairly small, these voters have drawn together to back the same candidate—Kasich—in states across the country. The question isn’t why moderates still have a candidate in the race; it’s how that moderate remnant chose Kasich and not Bush, Marco Rubio, or Chris Christie, each of them more famous, better-funded, and more obviously charismatic.
The Kasich campaign, up close, looked like a nostalgia trip from the outset. The candidate lugged a running debt clock to his appearances. His stump speech was a remembrance of the optimism that followed the moon landing and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Kasich rhapsodized about the relationship that Ronald Reagan had with the Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, and he excavated, from his own record, evidence of an equally bipartisan instinct, pointing to a debt-reduction bill he helped negotiate in Congress and to the cross-ideological panels he convened to improve Ohio’s schools. Closer examinations have concluded that the Ohio economy has not improved as much as Kasich suggests it has, that the debt-reduction bill he touts was a minor and partisan effort, and that he remains unwilling to declare that human beings cause climate change. In other words, his policy record is more sharply conservative than his tone would imply. But the tone has held. As the cast onstage at the Republican debates dwindled, Kasich refused to criticize either Trump or Cruz. His most obvious point of contrast was emotional. He was not angry, and he would not fake it.
As Kasich’s support moved from New Hampshire across the Northeast and Midwest—never the major wave in the Republican votes but often a discernible movement within them—it was this attribute that seemed to attract his supporters, the sensation of a sensibility. Unlike the rest of the field, Kasich “makes sense,” two people at his Bronx stop told a reporter for the Observer. “What really separates him,” the Concord Monitor declared, in giving Kasich a key endorsement before the New Hampshire primary, “is his desire and ability to find common ground.” In suburban Palatine, Illinois, ahead of the state’s primary, he drew what the Chicago Tribune called “his most raucous applause” by saying, “I refuse to get down in the mud.”
In New Hampshire, and then in South Carolina, and then across the Midwest, the more obvious and better-funded contenders for the conventional Republican vote reached for a wide coalition by making broad attacks on Cruz and Trump and striking pointed notes of conservatism—only to see their base of support eroded by defections to Kasich. We often talk of protest votes in Presidential politics as if they are fits of petulance by the social fringe, people who would rather hear someone express their ideas purely than see their party win the White House. The Pat Buchanan candidacies were protest votes; the Ron Paul surge was a protest movement; the enthusiasm that surrounded Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump at the start of their campaigns had a protest energy. In its way, the support for Kasich has also been an expression of values, rather than an instrumental calculation of how to win. The Kasich vote is a protest coming from the social establishment.
The Kasich districts, the places where he has done the best, describe a very particular American experience: the Boston suburbs of Brookline and Wellesley; the old Lake County commuter villages along the north shore of Chicago; Ann Arbor and the surrounding Washtenaw County, the towns to the west of Detroit. In the Republican primary four years ago, Kasich territory was the Mitt Romney heartland, and his voters picked the candidate who won their Party’s nomination. This time, those Republican voters—members of a party that is generally to their right, citizens of towns that are often to their left—are casting protest ballots against the tone of the primary and the populist fervor that has gripped it. Trump’s supporters are often said to share a vivid sense of loss: they are people whose status is not what it once was. But alongside the sense of economic loss moving through the country—and propelled, in some ways, by it—is the loss of political and social status among those accustomed to running things. In this election, more quietly, those emotions have mattered, too.
