Kathleen Gray

Detroit Free Press Lansing Bureau

UTICA — A folksy John Kasich came to Michigan Monday, trying to charm voters with home spun stories about how many of the problems in the country can be solved by people caring about each other.

“We want to capture the spirit of our country. You know where it lives,” he told more than 500 people who gathered at the Macomb County Republican Party headquarters in Utica. “It lives in our hearts, in our neighborhoods, in the way we treat one another, in the way we fix our schools.”

It was his third stop of the day in Michigan, after speaking with students at Grand Valley State University in Allendale and Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Long shot John Kasich is Dems' greatest fear

He told several hundred people in East Lansing that he wouldn’t institute free college if elected, something Democratic candidates have mentioned on the campaign trail, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders during a speech Monday at Eastern Michigan University. But Kasich did address the need to reduce the cost of attending college by eliminating overhead and advising colleges to drop considerations not related to educating students.

“We can’t slow down the cost of college,” he said. “Overhead is through the roof and colleges should be focusing on getting students in and out with the quality skills they need.”

While Kasich, the governor of Ohio who has several moderate stances, doesn't expect to repeat his second place finish in New Hampshire in South Carolina on Saturday or in the cluster of conservative Southern states that vote March 1, he’s targeting Michigan, which votes March 8, for his first GOP primary win. A week later, he’s hoping for a game-changing victory in Ohio.

His staff told reporters last week that he plans to treat Michigan the same way he campaigned in New Hampshire where he held 106 town hall meetings. He's spent the most time in Michigan of all the candidates with his ninth trip to the state Monday.

Unlike many of the other Republican candidates for president, Kasich said he has no desire to attack any of his opponents. As for the raucous debate on Saturday night: “It’s like we had a demolition derby and the good thing is that my car is still going around the track,” he said. “It’s very competitive and it’s difficult. People have put so much time into running and when they see the positive isn’t working, they go negative.”

In questions from the audience, Kasich said that more federal government involvement in education has to be shifted to the states, more vocational education should get to students at a younger age, and a corporate mentoring program that has had great success in Cincinnati needs to be expanded. He also said more renewable energy sources need to be developed, from wind and solar to geo thermal, and more energy efficiency models created.

And he reiterated his stance on immigration, saying that under a Kasich presidency, the federal government wouldn’t be driving into neighborhoods and yanking all 11.5 million undocumented immigrants from their homes and sending them back to their home countries. If the immigrants had no criminal record and were employed, he might fine them, but give them a path to legal status — but not citizenship.

And while he urged the Macomb voters to “forget about all that Ohio State, Michigan and Michigan State” rivalry and help out his campaign, he also said he’d be fine if he didn’t win the presidency.

“If I don’t get to be president, I’m going to go home and life is going to be OK,” he said.

Kasich is scheduled to do another town hall Tuesday morning at the GOP field office in Livonia.

Sanders in Michigan talks economy, trade, environment

Contact Kathleen Gray: 517-372-8661, kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal. Lansing State Journal reporter RJ Wolcott contributed to this report.