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“You really got it going here,” John Kasich told a room of Michigan Republicans Monday night.

John Kasich campaigns in Monroe, Michigan. Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA

All candidates woo voters in different ways and John Kasich’s approach is to treat them like a daughter’s prom date whom he really hopes will go steady with her.

While speaking at the annual Lincoln Day dinner of the Oakland County Republican Party on Monday night, Kasich gave his final pitch to a room full of activists munching on house salad with pale lettuce and even paler rubber chicken.

The Ohio governor, who repeatedly made jokes about his attending and supporting the hated Ohio State University, once again outlined his blue collar biography. Within three minutes, any attendee would had been living under a rock discovered that Kasich’s father was a mailman in McKee’s Rocks, Pennsylvania.

He went on to take some mild jabs at Hillary Clinton, wagging his finger at her condemnation of Michigan governor Rick Snyder in Sunday’s night. “Of all people to call on to resign,” he said, making a clear reference to her tenure as secretary of state during the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate at Benghazi. Kasich also took a shot at Bill Clinton. The Ohio governor said of the ex-president “He’s a guy if a riot’s coming up at him, he jumps in front of it and calls it a parade.”

However most of speech of an earnest recitation of his biography as the Ohio governor south to persuade these loyal partyline Republicans to back him intomorrow’s crucial primary. Although Kasich trails Trump in recent polls of the state, a strong second place finish could put him on track to win his home state of Ohio and supplant Marco Rubio as the establishment favorite in the race.

As he told attendees “the whole country .. . and the whole world” is watching Michigan tomorrow.