Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

John Kasich’s numbers are terrific.

No, not the number of primaries he’s won, or the number of votes he’s gotten, or the number of delegates he has. I mean the poll numbers that show the Ohio governor is well ahead of Hillary Clinton in a November matchup, while she beats mogul Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz. There’s even one that shows him dead even with Clinton in the deep, deep-blue state of New Jersey. Isn’t that exactly the kind of candidate delegates would and should turn to if they become unbound after the first ballot? Well, that’s his argument anyway.


Sorry, Gov. Kasich, but history says you’re wrong. And there may be good reasons why the “I’m electable” argument is less potent than it might appear.

For party delegates deciding how much “electability” matters, it’s important to remember that such springtime numbers have a fragile half-life. As Trump’s supporters keep reminding us, Ronald Reagan was running anywhere from 18 to 23 points behind President Jimmy Carter in the spring of 1980. One reason ex-President Gerald Ford flirted with entering the race—apart from a grudge from 1976—was that, as Time magazine noted at the time, “Ford shares the fears of many Republicans that Reagan cannot win if the Democrats re-nominate Jimmy Carter.”

Then in 1992, even as Bill Clinton was firming his grip on the nomination, the polls told a dismal story about his prospective election. In June, he was running third behind President George H.W. Bush and—in first place—Texas businessman Ross Perot. (Note: Springtime polls often elevate independent candidates—in 1980, John Anderson was running as high as 24 per cent against Carter and Reagan.) So there’s reason for Republicans looking at Kasich to be skeptical about these numbers.

Even if the numbers are sound, there’s a reason that they might spell out the wrong strategy for the campaign: "Electability" isn't the message that galvanizes a party base, and for good reason.

In 2000, every survey showed that Sen. John McCain would run far better against Vice President Al Gore than did George W. Bush. Around the time of New Hampshire, McCain had an 8-point lead, while Bush and Gore ran even.

But McCain was a heretic. He opposed the mammoth tax cuts proposed by Bush and congressional Republicans, preferring to see some of the surplus—yes, there was a surplus back then—go toward reducing the debt. And he’d teamed up with Sen. Russ Feingold, the most liberal Democrat in the Senate, to write a bill banning most soft money from campaigns (this was the law ultimately eviscerated by the Supreme Court).

That’s one of the reasons McCain won Republican voters only in New Hampshire and in his home state of Arizona. His margins elsewhere came from independents. For Republicans, he did not represent them as well as Bush did.

And that goes to the heart of the issue. A party is more than a collection of individuals looking for an appealing candidate: It's an organization searching for the person who the best embodies their beliefs. When the party faithful—the people who are delegates—pull the lever, they're going to be thinking about what kind of Republican Party they want, not just which horse is likely to finish first.

It makes sense for the party to think this way. Why? Because choosing a nominee simply on the basis of electability may wind up impeding the goals of that party’s base. Dwight Eisenhower was far more electable than conservative hero Robert Taft in 1952, but his two landslide elections wound up solidifying the expansion of the federal government under FDR and Harry S. Truman rather than advancing the agenda of the Republican Party. From the perspective of a Republican loyalist opposed to that expansion, Ike’s victories achieved almost nothing. (And if you throw in his appointment of Earl Warren and William Brennan, two of the most liberal Supreme Court justices in history, you could well argue that Eisenhower’s terms greatly expanded the liberal cause.)

That’s why The New Republic in 2012 could look back on that era and conclude that the “relationship between the 1950s conservative movement and its contemporaneous Republican president was one of mutual ill-will. Conservatives had expected that Eisenhower, as the first Republican president since 1932, would repeal the New Deal; instead he augmented and expanded programs like Social Security, thereby giving them bipartisan legitimacy. … He approved anti-recessionary stimulus spending, extended unemployment compensation, and raised the minimum wage. He pioneered federal aid to education and created the largest public-works program in history in the form of the interstate highway system. He levied gasoline taxes to pay for the highway construction, and believed that cutting income taxes when the federal government was running a deficit would be an act of gross fiscal irresponsibility.”

From that perspective, it’s unimaginable that today’s GOP, which is far more conservative than it was in Ike’s time, would turn to such an ideologically suspect candidate no matter how “electable” he or she was. In that sense, the GOP base shares the view expressed by ex-Sen. Jim DeMint when he said he’d rather have 30 strong conservatives than 50 centrist Republicans. And a lot of Republican delegates will be thinking just that way as they head into the convention in Cleveland in July.

By contrast, Bernie Sanders—who in some polls runs better against Trump and Cruz than does Clinton—has at least a plausible argument that his candidacy better reflects where the Democrats are going—left—and that the new, younger voters he would draw make a good fit with that direction. For Sanders, the electability argument could work—but only because he’s already made the liberal base happy.

There is one thing that Kasich does have in his favor, however: the argument that Trump doesn’t really channel the party base either, at least when it comes to ideas. Trump too is an apostate on free trade, which has been a core GOP plank until now, and seemingly on health care. Trump also may have done himself no favors by embracing an exception to the draconian abortion plank of the GOP platform. It may appeal to independents, but that’s not where the base of the party is—at least, not if you judge by the past 32 years of party platforms.

But despite his long history in the conservative movement, especially as a key player in the rise of Newt Gingrich as House speaker in the 1990s, Kasich has come to be seen as a heretic too; his decision to accept Medicaid expansion made him a pariah to those in his party who believe that anything associated with “Obama-health-care-idea” should be shunned like the devil’s brew. A year ago he told a few of us journalists that “I think I have the right to try to define what conservatism means.” But if the primaries are any evidence, he has failed to do that with the rank and file of his own party.

Kasich’s argument that he has governed as a conservative has had no impact in a primary where the experience of governing is apparently seen as a liability (as Scott Walker, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush learned). He has tried, for example, to argue that his Medicaid expansion is conservative at heart—it saves money, it keeps lower-income workers off welfare, it gets drug addicts out of jail and into treatment, in the spirit of conservative support of prison reform. But this argument has found no resonance in his party.

Moreover, Cruz’s constant pursuit of a “no enemies to the right” strategy has made it all but impossible for the Ohio governor to make any inroads among true believing conservatives.

Kasich has almost no line to the nomination, but if he’s to have any hope at all he ought to minimize his electability pitch and rejuvenate the idea that he speaks for the base. Because they’re the ones who will decide, and right now they’re thinking of the vote that happens in July, not the one in November.