With the front-runners in both parties losing the Wisconsin primaries this week, the races on both sides have shifted.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has now won the last six contests – some by landslide margins – and his campaign outraised former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's for the third month in a row, bringing in a whopping $44 million to her $29.5 million in March. He continues to draw huge crowds to his rallies and while she's ahead in the delegate count, the upcoming New York primary has suddenly become a must-win for Clinton. The press has started the she's-limping-to-the-nomination narrative, and frankly, it's hard to disagree.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's big win in Wisconsin was the shot in the arm that he needed, allowing him to say that Wisconsin was a "turning point – it is a rallying cry" – which I'm not sure is truly the case. Cruz may think he's got the momentum to beat businessman Donald Trump, but his unfavorable ratings are still, like Trump's and Clinton's, at historically high levels.

According to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, Cruz's unfavorable ratings are underwater, by a negative 19 points (33 favorable/52 unfavorable); Trump's are even worse, at at negative 33 points (30/63). Clinton's aren't as bad as either one of them: she's only got a a 14-point deficit (40/54), according to the site. As of this week, in head-to-head matchups nationally, Clinton wins against Trump by an 11-point margin, and beats Cruz by a three-point margin in the RCP average. You can see why many Republicans aren't crazy about the prospect of either Cruz or Trump as the party's nominee.

And yet what's been surprising to me this week is the mounting pressure for Ohio Gov. John Kasich to leave the race.

The airwaves are full of moneyball-type guys, the types of political operatives who are into the horse race numbers, the delegate counts, the state-by-state crosstabs from the pollsters. They argue that Kasich doesn't have the numbers, that he's only won Ohio, that it's already a two-man race, and the Buckeye State chief executive has no clear pathway to the nomination. And, while he's got "every right" to stay in the race, he's subverting the will of the people by hoping to get delegates to switch to him on a second or third ballot.

"If I didn't have Kasich, I automatically win," Trump said last weekend. "He doesn't have to run and take my votes ... he's not taking Ted Cruz's votes, he's taking my votes," Trump added.

"Every day John Kasich stays in the race benefits Donald Trump," Cruz said in late March. As it stands now, Trump must win about 63 percent of the remaining delegates to get to the 1,237-vote majority he needs, and that would be a lot easier if it were a two-man race. But, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out this week, Kasich has more political appeal than Trump does in the more suburban mid-Atlantic states that are still to vote, and a better chance of winning delegates than Cruz does in upcoming contests in Pennsylvania and Maryland. The polls ahead of the New York primary currently have Kasich in second place ahead of Cruz.

"He has no hope of reaching 1,237 delegates before the convention," the Journal editors wrote, "but what Messrs. Trump and Cruz really fear is that the convention might want to nominate a potential winner."

So let's consider the case for John Kasich. He's outlasted early favorites like Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson and Scott Walker. As of this week, Kasich is the only Republican in the race who consistently beats Hillary Clinton in a head-to-head matchup, winning by a six-point average margin on Real Clear Politics. He's also the only Republican with higher favorables than unfavorables, by 43 to 30, a 13-point positive margin.

Maybe that's because among Republicans, over and over again, I hear disgust at the insults, the Twitter attacks, the rambling unscripted speeches and the lack of forward-looking, positive policy ideas. And lately, the two names that come up the most in that context are Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

Last month, Barron's switched its endorsement for president from Hillary Clinton to John Kasich because the paper believes he'd be better for markets and investors, based on his across-the-board tax cutting plan. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan policy group, has concluded that Kasich's plan will get the federal budget to balance by the end of his second term, which neither Trump nor Cruz can say. In fact, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation says Cruz's plan could increase the federal government's deficit by $3.6 trillion over the next decade, and Trump's plan could add $10 trillion.

As a former three-term chairman of the House budget committee, Kasich knows how to broker a compromise; having him in the White House with Paul Ryan as speaker figures to work well – especially in comparison to Cruz, who has a record of obstructionism in the Senate. And as governor of Ohio since 2011, Kasich has turned a near $8 billion state budget deficit into a $2 billion surplus while cutting taxes and funding K-12 schools at an all-time high; unemployment has fallen from 9.2 percent to 4.9 percent; and Ohio has become one of the top job-creating states in the country. No wonder he was re-elected by a 30-point margin in 2014.

I've been talking lately to a lot of voters in different states – some have already voted, some are still waiting to – of all ages and walks of life. And my experience is that there is a deep hunger for substantive conversation, for information about policies that will get our country back on track, for thoughtful consideration about where we are headed next and how best to manage the changes we face as a nation. My sense is that Kasich is the only candidate having that kind of conversation in town halls across America. To me he comes across as very honest and authentic, and as a man of deep faith.