Ohio Gov. John Kasich is starting to look serious about running for president in 2016. Already touring early primary states, he has now hired John Weaver and Fred Davis, two top Republican campaign veterans, to join his embryonic White House bid.
Weaver, a top adviser to John McCain during his 2000 presidential campaign and Jon Huntsman in 2012, will be senior strategist. Davis, known for his quirky ads like Carly Fiorina’s “Demon Sheep” commercial and Christine O’Donnell’s “I’m not a witch” spot, is slated to be a media consultant for Kasich’s super PAC.
Kasich had already signed pollster Linda DiVall. Although he is stuck at 2 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average, on paper a Kasich presidential campaign makes a lot of sense. He was just re-elected by a landslide margin in the must win-state of Ohio, carrying 86 out of 88 counties and winning at least 60 percent of the vote in 47 of them.
Before he was elected governor, Kasich served nine terms in Congress and rose to chairman of the House Budget Committee after the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” In that capacity, he played a key role in passing welfare reform, the first broad-based federal tax cuts since the Reagan administration and the first balanced federal budget since 1969.
All of those were conservative policy accomplishments, but they were also bipartisan ones. They each required the assent of President Bill Clinton, who as luck would have it is also the husband of the likely 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.
While no one has ever won the GOP nomination polling as far back as Kasich nationally and in the early states, there is something different about polling at 2 percent this time around. Normally, that means being down at least 20 points. In the latest Fox News poll, Kasich is 10 points behind national front-runners Jeb Bush and Scott Walker.
And yet there is a bit of déjà vu with Weaver joining Kasich. Kasich has ruffled feathers with his strong support for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, defense of Common Core and harsh criticism of limited-government conservatives who have broken with him on both issues.
Weaver is associated with McCain and Huntsman campaigns that ran to the left of the establishment front-runners, winning media approval but ultimately having no realistic path to the nomination.
Both Republicans had conservative records prior to running for president. Huntsman had been a pro-life, pro-gun governor of deep-red Utah while McCain, who had already been moving left after conservatives spurned his signature campaign finance reform, was an ’80s Reaganite who had endorsed Phil Gramm for president in 1996.
McCain did finish second behind George W. Bush and ultimately won the nomination in 2008, although his inability to win over registered Republicans rather than independents doomed him in 2000’s closed primaries. Huntsman finished a strong third in the New Hampshire primary but was otherwise unable to gain any traction and dropped out early.
Davis also worked for McCain, in 2008, and Huntsman.
Can Kasich avoid their fate? The Ohio governor was initially seen as a Walker-like conservative reformer, backing public sector collective bargaining reforms that went further than the Wisconsin governor’s. But after those reforms failed at the ballot box, Kasich increasingly got into fights with conservatives, inviting comparisons to Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was governor of California.
Kasich would join a crowded field and at the moment would miss the cutoff for the first Republican candidates’ debate, to be held in his home state of Ohio.
