On Monday night, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich completed his journey from conservative darling and Republican rising star to speaker at the Democratic National Convention.
“I’m a lifelong Republican, but that attachment holds second place to my responsibility to my country,” Kasich said at the event. “That’s why I’ve chosen to appear at this convention. In normal times, something like this would probably never happen, but these are not normal times.”
Kasich led a small group of Republican dissidents at the mostly virtual convention’s opening night. But unlike former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former New York Rep. Susan Molinari, or businesswoman Meg Whitman, Kasich wasn’t identified with the GOP’s centrist wing for most of his career. An anti-abortion budget cutter, Kasich identified with conservatives since winning a seat in the Ohio state Senate at age 26.
“John was a conservative early on,” said a former Ohio Republican official. “He was a fighter.”
The son of a mailman, Kasich, first elected to represent a central Ohio congressional district in 1982, originally rose to national prominence as a foot soldier in Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” in the 1990s. With the election of the first House majority in 40 years, at 42, he ascended to the chairmanship of the House Budget Committee, a post from which he crafted blueprints for cutting federal spending, lowering taxes, reforming welfare, and balancing the budget.
Most controversially, Kasich sought to reduce the rate of growth of Medicare spending to achieve $270 billion in savings, which Democrats assailed as necessary only to pay for the GOP’s proposed $245 billion tax cut. He also wanted to trim the foreign aid budget 30% across the board, exempting Israel. Republicans were savaged in the press for trying to defund Big Bird via zeroing out federal funds for public broadcasting and cutting the National Endowment for the Arts.
Some of these cuts never happened. But by 1997, Kasich was credited with working with then-President Bill Clinton to deliver the first balanced federal budget since 1969.
After a decade out of elective office, Kasich was elected governor of Ohio on a balanced-budget platform in 2010, the beginning of the Tea Party era, unseating an incumbent Democrat. In office, he pushed for privatization, championed concealed carry rights for gun owners, supported defunding Planned Parenthood, and signed legislation pro-choice activists blamed for the closure of half of the abortion clinics in Ohio. Like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, he tried to curb collective bargaining by public sector unions. The measure was reversed by voters when labor leaders put it on the ballot as a referendum.
After that setback, some allies began to sense a shift in Kasich. Reelected easily in 2014, he fought conservatives in his own party to win approval for expanding Medicaid in Ohio through Obamacare. The New York Times headlined a story about the battle, “Ohio Governor defies GOP with defense of social safety net,” quoting Kasich as saying, “I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor.” The New York Times reported Kasich “occasionally sounds more like an heir to Lyndon B. Johnson than to Ronald Reagan.”
“I had a conversation with one of the members of the legislature the other day,” Kasich said in 2013. “I said, ‘I respect the fact that you believe in small government. I do, too. I also know that you’re a person of faith.’”
He added: “‘Now, when you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.’”
After a 2015 tour promoting a federal balanced budget amendment, Kasich jumped into the Republican presidential race. Like prior John Weaver-advised GOP candidates John McCain in 2000 and Jon Huntsman in 2012, he received favorable press coverage and was competitive in New Hampshire, where he finished a distant second with nearly 16% of the vote, but he couldn’t break through with conservatives nationally. Kasich emerged as a vocal critic of front-runner Donald Trump and, unlike many other candidates, remained one after Trump secured the nomination, refusing to vote for him that November.
This time Kasich is actively supporting the Democratic ticket. Though criticized by Never Trumpers in 2016 for not dropping out quickly enough to allow the field to coalesce around a single anti-Trump candidate, he became a spokesman for their concerns about Trump’s temperament and fitness for office. “I know that Joe Biden, with his experience and his wisdom and his decency, can bring us together to help us find that better way,” Kasich said Monday night.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among the liberal Democrats critical of Kasich getting such a large role at their convention, similar to ones played by Democrats Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman at GOP confabs in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Republicans have also panned Kasich’s conversion.
“John Kasich’s party and ideology were always selfishly about John Kasich more than the GOP or conservatism,” said Republican strategist Nicholas Everhart. “I think in a lot of ways, it just burns Kasich that Trump was able to take over and mold the party in his own image in a way Kasich had always hoped he’d be able to, but clearly failed.”
“After tonight, his future as a Republican is over, and Democrats will have no further use for him,” said Bradley Blakeman, a former aide to President George W. Bush. “It was opening and closing night for Kasich’s one act play.”
