Kasich Cannot Win

Those hoping for a Gov. John Kasich comeback to knock Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz out of the way to the Republican nomination are deluding themselves in an attempt to ignore the great political revolution under way. Although Kasich is certainly the most reasonable candidate in a circus of a Republican Party, he is utterly unelectable to the GOP primary voter base when compared to exciting speakers such as Trump and Cruz, and he represents the very establishment that voters are clearly rejecting this cycle. Great media publications such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe are endorsing him in an attempt to give him the push he would need to win in the Iowa caucuses. However, in an age where power is increasingly moving away from consolidated establishment sources, people no longer rely on the great newspapers to inform them as they make their electoral choices.The New York Times lauds Kasich for his experience and his relatively moderate stances compared to the extremists fighting for the GOP nomination. Both are good reasons to support him in the primaries. Both are why he will lose the primaries. The American people are tired of the establishment, the political machine that raised Kasich. Although this experience will aid him if he somehow manages to become president by enabling him to understand the complexities of American politics, they make him incredibly unattractive to the GOP voter base. As the rise of Carson and Trump have shown, the people don’t want a politician as president. If he becomes president, his relative moderateness will allow him to negotiate more easily and would likely allow him to achieve more change than his fellow Republican candidates. It would also make him more electable in the general election by enabling him to gain more independent support. Voter bases on both sides however, are rapidly moving away from the center and are becoming increasingly more extreme. Republicans are becoming more and more conservative, while Democrats are becoming incredibly liberal. To get to the general election he will have to go through the primaries first, and to win the primaries he will need to appeal to a voter base that is looking to elect the loudest, most extreme, most brash candidate they can find.Those who endorse Kasich are making a valiant effort to return the GOP away from extremism. Kasich will certainly make a much better president than Trump or Cruz. To elect Kasich, however, they would have had to have made an active effort to maintain establishment control much earlier. The rise of populism and anti-establishment politics that will cause Kasich’s defeat began much earlier. Frustration with the current political system has been growing for years now, due to our ineffective government that is constantly in deadlock. Americans have lost faith in the political establishment which Kasich is part of; it is the same establishment whose power he would prolong and be extended by him becoming president. The only way to make Kasich electable is to make the status quo attractive: to make moderation and tradition more attractive than change. It is far too late to do that. The current party heads would have had to fix the establishment from the inside much earlier, before the public lost faith.Although the Democratic and Republican National Conventions remain far away and much may change between now and then, throughout this election cycle so far, it is clear that on both sides of the aisle insurgent anti-establishment forces have had and will continue to have a major impact. The disenfranchised voters that back Trump, Carson and Cruz are not going anywhere, and the establishment voters are currently spread out over multiple candidates. Even if the scattered establishment voters manage to consolidate under one candidate, they could not break the momentum and appeal that non-establishment candidates currently hold. Nothing in this race can be certain this far away from the conventions, but as candidates have risen and fallen, the support of non-establishment candidates and a distrust of the political machine have been constant. Kasich would likely fare better in the general election than Trump or Cruz, but he will need a major push to win the primaries and get past the nominating period, which he is unlikely to get. To think that Kasich could win at this point appears to be more of a pipe dream than reality, which could unfortunately spell doom for the future of the Republican establishment.