Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s delusional fantasies of winning the Republican nomination have gotten out of control. Consider this an intervention.
Lately, Kasich has been doing some extremely awkward TV interviews in which he has been repeating his fantasy about having a better-than-snowball’s-chance-in-hell at winning the GOP nomination.
As I explained earlier, it’s mathematically impossible for Kasich to secure the magic 1,237 number of delegates needed to win the nomination outright. His only chance at possibly being the Republican candidate for president is through a contested convention, which he is trying to force by acting as a spoiler candidate.
But this strategy is sheer fantasy. The only way it makes sense for the Republican Party to crown Kasich as the winner of a contested convention is if everyone at the Cleveland convention is huffing as much paint as the Ohio governor and his campaign staff probably are.
The idea that the GOP would nominate a candidate whose greatest accomplishments are winning his home state and only losing by 20 percent to Trump in another state is as crazy as saying that implementing the Medicaid expansion equals rejecting Obamacare.
I’m not the only one who has pointed out how delusional this is, either. In an epic Twitter rant, The Weekly Standard‘s Jay Cost detailed how insane Kasich’s campaign is. Several of his points are worth repeating here.
As Cost pointed out, it would be great — from an anti-Trump perspective — if a more moderate candidate were able to sweep some more northeastern states away from Trump. However, Kasich is not the guy to do this. In the Massachusetts primary, in which Kasich placed second, he only fared 0.01 percent better than Marco Rubio, who has since dropped out of the race, while Trump took The Bay State with a cool 31 percent lead.
Also, locking up votes in the upcoming primaries in states like New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the like requires actually being there, but today, Kasich is in Wisconsin.
Kasich’s efforts at getting onto the ballot have been embarrassingly disastrous. For example, in Pennsylvania, a college student nearly derailed Kasich’s campaign after he alleged that 800 of the 2,184 signatures submitted in order to be on the ballot were invalid.
In response, Kasich’s own lawyers basically said “Yep, we screwed up,” and by their own estimates, 192 of the submitted signatures were not valid.
The Kasich campaign bungled Utah, badly. They spent about $275,000 on ads in Utah, but only earned 16.8 percent of the vote, resulting in a zero delegate win, as Cruz swept all 40 of the state’s delegates by locking up 69.2 percent of the vote. It’s not like the Kasich campaign has a lot of cash to burn, either: he may run out of money before April.
In Arizona, Kasich came in fourth place, trailing behind Marco Rubio, who dropped out of the race earlier this month. One would think that placing behind a candidate who is no longer running would serve as a wake-up call, but apparently not.
Last week, Kasich earned none of Wyoming’s 950 county conventions, which also seems to contradict the theory that he can win over a bunch of delegates during the Republican convention in Cleveland to emerge the victor.
The level of incompetency and overall lack of self-awareness that has plagued this son-of-a-mailman’s campaign is probably what’s keeping him from seeing the light and dropping out, which Cost put nicely here:
https://twitter.com/JayCostTWS/status/712706954452471808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
At this point, it’s probably safe to assume that if Kasich’s campaign bus got into a car accident, it would explode due to the sheer amount of paint thinner stored inside.
