Ohio Governor John Kasich just upset a lot of women.
While campaigning in Virginia ahead of the March 1 primary, Kasich’s unfortunate statement about an “army of women” who helped him get elected to state Senate was caught on video and subsequently blew up on social media.
“How did I get elected? I didn’t have anybody for me,” he said. “We just got an army of people who — and many women who left their kitchens to go out door-to-door and put yard signs up for me, all the way back when things were different.”
Kasich was referring to when he was first elected to the state Senate in 1978.
“Now you call homes, and everybody’s working,” he added.
A George Mason University student at the event spoke up saying, “I’ll come out and support you, but I won’t be coming out of the kitchen.”
Kasich’s spokesman Rob Nichols attempted to put out the fire.
“John Kasich’s campaigns have always been homegrown affairs,” he said in a statement to NBC News. They’ve literally been run out of his friends’ kitchens and many of his early campaign teams were made up of stay-at-home moms who believed deeply in the changes he wanted to bring to them and their families. That’s real grassroots campaigning and he’s proud of that authentic support. To try and twist his comments into anything else is just desperate politics.”
The comments added fuel to the fire among liberal groups that are angry with Kasich for defunding Planned Parenthood in Ohio. The governor signed a bill on Sunday that will prohibit state funding going towards any organization that performs abortions.
