Deirdre Shesgreen

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — After another embarrassing primary loss and growing ridicule from fellow Republicans, John Kasich’s top campaign advisers told a group of Washington lobbyists and donors Wednesday the Ohio governor still could snag the GOP nomination at a contested convention in July.

Bob Rusbuldt, an insurance industry lobbyist and major Kasich supporter, said the message of the closed-door meeting was twofold: first, no candidate will go into the Republican National Convention in July with a majority of the delegates; and second, “anything can happen” at a contested convention.

The Washington meeting came on the heels of a withering loss in Wisconsin — a state Kasich had seen as fertile ground for him but where he finished a distant third, securing 14 percent of the vote. And it came amid increasingly vocal calls for Kasich to drop out, mostly from his rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and New York businessman Donald Trump.

Kasich did not attend the Washington meeting, as it unfolded just hours before he was scheduled to give his State of the State address back home. Reporters were barred from the building, so it was difficult to determine how many people attended.

Rusbuldt said it was aimed at wooing former supporters of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who both dropped out of the race earlier this year. “We have a bunch of former Bush and Rubio types that are looking for a home and we’re looking to provide them a home,” he said.

But another attendee, former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., said the room was filled with Kasich devotees. “This is a group that (is) ... on board,” he said.

If nothing else, the strategy session was proof that this week’s rough patch was not going to alter Kasich’s course. He will likely go into the convention with fewer delegates than other GOP contenders — including some who have already dropped out of the race.

Kasich has argued if no one clinches the nomination in the first round of voting, delegates will flock to his candidacy because he is the strongest Republican candidate in a general election. But neither Kasich nor his aides have provided any real details yet of how they would execute such a strategy, which many Republicans have derided as unrealistic.

“It is hard to image a scenario in which, even in a deadlocked convention, delegates turn to the candidate who” finished third or worse in their home states, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote Wednesday. Calling Kasich a “proven loser,” she speculated that either “ego or the quixotic and hypocritical quest for a VP slot keeps Kasich in the race.”

But as participants left Wednesday’s strategy session, they were upbeat and optimistic about Kasich’s pathway.

“We think he’s gonna win it,” said Lott. He speculated Kasich would close out the primary season with 500 delegates or more, and he would sway convention attendees to his camp with his “positive” message.

Charlie Black, a high-powered Washington lobbyist who is crafting Kasich’s convention strategy, put a little more meat on that bone, according to one person who was in the room and agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. Black told the group the delegates will mostly be “Republican establishment types” who don’t support Trump or Cruz, this source said.

They will vote for Trump or Cruz on the first round because they have to under convention rules. But as the voting moves into second or third rounds, Black argued, they will shift to Kasich as the most viable establishment alternative.

“Black talked about how … Trump and Cruz are going to go into the convention with certain numbers of delegates and they will have trouble expanding on that after the first round of voting,” this GOP source said.

Other Republicans said that’s pie-in-the-sky thinking.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who dropped out of the presidential running earlier this year, said if Trump doesn’t win enough delegates in the first round of voting at the convention, the natural alternative will be Cruz — not Kasich.

“I think the most logical choice would be Cruz,” said Graham, who first endorsed Bush but is now backing Cruz. “I think Kasich’s going to have the hardest sell of anybody. I think Cruz is in a much better position.”

There were other, harsher assessments of Kasich’s plan.

Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of the conservative National Review Online, noted Kasich has lost 31 primary contests and won just one — his home state of Ohio.

“It's not just that Kasich can't take a hint,” Goldberg wrote in a column Wednesday. “It's that he appears to be living in a kind of fantasy world, largely defined by three myths or delusions.” Among those delusions, he said, was Kasich’s main rationale for staying in the race — that polls show he could beat the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

For many delegates, “it would seem either unfair or downright crazy to skip over bigger vote-getters and back Kasich just because he won his home state of Ohio,” Goldberg wrote.

Rusbuldt shrugged off questions about whether it would be unfair or undemocratic for Kasich to try to wrest the nomination from his two rivals even if they won far more GOP votes than he did in the primaries.

“There is a lot of precedent for nominees not having the most delegates coming into the convention,” he said. “And nobody can predict what these hundreds and hundreds of delegates are going to do. They may stick with their candidate. But I don’t think all of them will.”