New York

Ohio governor John Kasich is riding shotgun in a large black SUV that’s rolling through midtown Manhattan when he pulls out his smartphone and assumes the role of disc jockey. First up is Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” a piano-based melody. “I think about my wife when I hear this,” Kasich says. “Isn’t that a beautiful song?” He then switches to something more upbeat. “Remember this one, Doug?” Kasich asks his political aide Doug Preisse, who traveled everywhere with Kasich during his 2016 presidential campaign. Doug is stumped. “Bowie!” Kasich exclaims before switching songs again halfway through David Bowie’s “Starman.”

“I’ve really recorded a lot of good stuff here. How about this one, Doug? Who’s this?” Kasich asks, as the hand holding the smartphone bounces from side to side to the beat of the new song.

“This is your little boyfriend, Justin Bieber,” Preisse replies. “Aren’t you a Belieber?” As Bieber’s late-2015 hit “Sorry” plays in the background, Kasich laughs and asks: “Did you see where Selena Gomez and Bieber are going to church now?”

When we get out of the SUV, I ask Kasich if his teenage daughters turned him on to Bieber. “No, that’s what everybody wants to say: His wife dresses him, and his daughters give him his music. Sheesh!

“I find my own music and I dress myself.”

It’s not every day you meet a grown man, let alone a 65-year-old sitting governor, who admits to enjoying the music of a Canadian tween idol. But Kasich likes marching to his own tune. Barred by Ohio’s term limits from seeking a third term as governor in 2018, he is increasingly open about the possibility of running for president in 2020 as an independent.

For the last few weeks, Kasich has mused in interviews that we may be seeing “the end of a two-party system.” The unspoken implication: He’s just the guy to hurry that process along. Asked if he’s going to run as an independent, Kasich tells me: “I honestly don’t know. But we do have a political organization. We’re not taking any options off the table, because we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

Like his taste in music, Kasich’s politics and personality are an eclectic mix that has put him out of step with the Republican party: elements of conservatism, liberalism, and populism mixed together with an infatuation with bipartisanship and a strain of moralism that annoys many conservatives but earns him strange new respect from some liberals.

While Kasich and his team insist he’s open to the possibility of running in a Republican primary, with or without Donald Trump in the race, his swing through New York has more the feel of an independent proto-presidential-campaign trip. Instead of jumping from coffeehouse to American Legion hall in New Hampshire, Kasich bounces from green room to green room in Manhattan for six on-camera interviews: MSNBC (twice), CNN, CNBC, and websites Now This News and TheStreet.com. Kasich attends a town hall at Stuyvesant High School; he was invited by a young 2016 campaign volunteer named Hugo Smith and his father ( BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith). Conspicuously absent from his schedule is any appearance on Fox News, where Kasich hosted his own show and filled in for Bill O’Reilly from 2001 to 2007.

Whenever Kasich has popped up on TV over the past year, he has tended to discuss issues that put him at odds with Republicans—gun control, a no-strings-attached bill to protect from deportation illegal immigrants who arrived as minors, his opposition to GOP legislation to partially repeal Obamacare, and an unapologetic defense of his decision to expand Medicaid in Ohio under Obamacare. “I think our audience agrees with me: You’re one of the good ones,” Bill Maher told Kasich during a 2017 appearance on Maher’s HBO show, a comment that was met with whoops and applause. “Look at that. That’s pretty good for a liberal California audience.”

During his March 12 appearance on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, Kasich touts his support for gun control, noting that he voted for the assault weapons ban back in 1994 (a minority position in the Republican party then, it is almost nonexistent within the congressional GOP now). When Hayes presses Kasich on the bills he backed expanding gun rights and the NRA’s support for Kasich in 2014—an endorsement scrubbed from Kasich’s website following the Parkland massacre—Kasich defends the legislation he signed: “Concealed carry is not what has led to this kind of problem.” In a hallway outside the studio afterwards, I ask Kasich if he misses hosting his own TV show. “No,” he replies. “I’m governor. I have a TV show. It’s called ‘Governor.’ ”

The next morning, in the green room at MSNBC, Kasich learns of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s firing, and he criticizes the chaos in the Trump administration during his hour on air. After the show, I ask him if he has any regrets about rebuffing a reported overture from Donald Trump Jr. to serve as his father’s vice president and missing the opportunity to influence the president from the inside. “There was never any chance I would do anything like that,” Kasich says. “I’m governor of Ohio, I have a big job. We just fundamentally disagree.” Trump Jr. has disputed the claim that he floated the VP offer to a top Kasich adviser: “You know the way I conduct myself,” he told CNN in 2016. “Do you really believe I would say, ‘[John Kasich] is in charge of foreign and domestic policy and [Donald Trump] will focus on making America great again’? What am I, a meathead?”

Kasich is upfront about his estrangement from the Republican party under Trump. “I just don’t support the current agenda: the anti-immigrant, anti-trade, not worried about debt—I don’t like any of that. Is that temporary? I don’t know,” Kasich says. “I do think that partisanship has become a substitute for religion—‘I’m clinging to my party’—you know? ‘I used to cling to my Presbyterianism,’ and now, you know, well, that’s sort of out the window, so now: ‘ It’s my party!’ ” The last three words drip with resentment as he mimics an angry partisan.

* *

Twenty-one years ago, John Kasich was featured on the cover of this magazine under the headline: “ It’s His Party.” Kasich “is running for president,” Andrew Ferguson reported in June 1997, and “no one seems to think his running is a thoroughly ridiculous idea even though he is a relatively obscure congressman from Ohio. And the reason no one thinks it’s ridiculous is that John Kasich, more than any other Republican politician, more than Newt Gingrich even, occupies the center of gravity of the Republican party these days.” Times have changed.

Not only is the Ohio governor on the outs with the GOP, a Kasich 2020 presidential campaign would strike some as quixotic, if not ridiculous. So I turned to two of the best political analysts in the country, Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics, to assess Kasich’s presidential prospects.

They agreed about Kasich’s chances of defeating Trump head-to-head in a GOP primary. “As of today, Kasich would have no shot,” says Olsen. “The lesson of 2016 is that you never put a zero-percent chance on anything, but pretty close,” says Trende.

They disagreed about Kasich’s odds in a Republican primary in which Trump, for whatever reason, wasn’t running. “In 2016, [Kasich] had very limited appeal. He appealed primarily to moderates who were educated,” says Olsen, but “if Kasich runs more as what he is—which is a garden-variety center-right politician—he could very well beat” Republicans running to the right in a Trump-less primary. “I don’t think he can win a Republican primary having been as what Republican voters will perceive as disloyal as Kasich has been,” says Trende.

But the two agreed that an independent bid could be serious under plausible circumstances. “Two major pre-requisites for a non-farcical Kasich campaign are Trump’s job approval stays in the low 40s and Democrats nominate someone like [Bernie] Sanders,” says Trende. “There’s a bunch of weird questions” in this scenario, he adds. For example: “What happens in Connecticut? You can see Sanders getting the liberal and maybe the inner-city vote, and then Trump getting eastern Connecticut where he ran well last time and some of the areas outside of New Haven where the Italians moved, and then Kasich cleaning up in western Connecticut. Who wins that? I don’t know.”

“Kasich would need to think of himself as the American Emmanuel Macron,” says Olsen. “ ‘I’m going to run as all flavors of center—from center-right to center-left—and it will be a genuine coalition.’ That could win if there is somebody so far left that the center-left feels they have a better shot with an independent than with a Democrat. It all depends on what the establishment of the Democratic party wants to do.”

So you may think a Kasich candidacy would be good or bad, but there’s a decent chance it could matter. Even protest candidates (think of Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader) can shape the dynamics of a race in important ways and potentially tip the election one way or the other.

There are of course all sorts of reasons why a third-party victory would be unlikely even in the best of circumstances. We live in a polarized country, and the Constitution militates toward a two-candidate race by requiring the winner to get a majority of Electoral College votes (or a majority of congressional delegations in the House in the absence of an Electoral College victor).

Then there’s the lack of a party infrastructure and organization. When I ask Kasich how a third party would get off the ground, he says: “Rich people that say they’ve had enough and they’re willing to put money into it—that’s how it gets started.” It’s unclear whether Kasich met with any such rich people during his trip to New York, but there were a few hours in his schedule reserved for meetings about which his staff wouldn’t provide any details.

“There are many donors and corporate executives who have grown tired of the chaotic clown car,” Kasich’s political strategist John Weaver tells me, without naming names. “I don’t have a doubt that if there was a serious and real possibility, that there would be more than enough money to challenge the president early in either the primary or the independent line on ballots across the country.”

Yet there are all kinds of difficult ideological and policy questions that would make it hard for a centrist coalition to hold. What kind of Supreme Court nominee could voters expect from a third-party president? Which sitting or former Supreme Court justice does Kasich find to be a model? He doesn’t answer the question, pointing only to the “reasonable” judges he’d nominated to the Ohio supreme court. What does he think about Neil Gorsuch? “I think he’s fine. I mean, I don’t know that much about him,” Kasich replies. He wouldn’t simply outsource the decision to the Federalist Society, but says: “I’m gonna want to have a conservative. . . . I’m not gonna have some liberal. I don’t agree with them.”

Should Roe v. Wade be overturned? “I’m pro-life and, you know, I’m not in the Congress now, and we’re moving probably more and more towards putting limits on the late-stage [abortions]. That’s probably where we are right now,” Kasich says. “I just don’t know what will happen.”

Would he like to see Roe overturned eventually? “I’m pro-life, so that’s all I can tell you,” he says. “Rape, incest, the life of the mother ought to be the exceptions. That’s kind of where I come down.”

As governor, Kasich signed bills defunding Planned Parenthood and banning late-term abortion and abortion targeting children with Down syndrome. But he doesn’t want to talk about any of it. “Look, let me just explain,” he says. “I have my positions on it, but there are other things I’d rather focus on and concentrate on. These are big hot-button wedge issues that Billy Graham said he himself avoided. If he could avoid them, I can avoid talking about it as much. I don’t want to be focused on things that automatically divide people. I say what I have to say about it. I do what I have to do, and that’s the end of it.”

There has actually always been a strong streak of moralism in John Kasich’s rhetoric, just not about the issues that most concern social conservatives. In 1997, when he chaired the House Budget Committee, Kasich was known as a deficit hawk who had just inked a deal with Bill Clinton to balance the budget. The year before, Kasich helped lead the effort to reform welfare and was praised as one of the best communicators in the GOP. As Andrew Ferguson reported then in these pages:

On welfare reform he is particularly artful. “I once told this roomful of rich people,” he told the roomful of rich people in Iowa, “Look, we didn’t reform welfare for you.” The Republicans looked disappointed, but only momentarily. “We did it for Joe. You know Joe? Maybe you’ve seen him when you forgot your briefcase one night and went back to your office on the 31st floor and there he was sweeping up and emptying the trash. And we did it for Carol, who’s pouring Starbucks coffee at the airport for just above minimum wage, and she’s wakin’ up at 6 a.m. to take her kids to day care, ’cause her husband left her, and when she goes to work she parks in a parking lot that’s closer to Mars than it is to the terminal where she works. “So I tell you, we didn’t reform welfare for rich people. We reformed it for Carol and Joe. Because it is immoral—it is a sin—to take money from Carol and from Joe and give it to people who don’t want to work.”

Today, the issue for which Kasich is probably best known is his decision to expand Medicaid, the country’s biggest welfare program. But this is an example of Kasich moving with the Republican party, not against it. Mike Pence expanded Medicaid in Indiana. So did Republican governors in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Iowa. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker was the only Rust-Belt Republican who didn’t.

What set Kasich apart from other Republicans on Medicaid was the argument he made. “Now, when you die and get to the meeting with Saint Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small,” Kasich said in 2013. “But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.” To fulfill the heavenly mandate, Kasich did an end-run around the full legislature and had Medicaid expansion approved by a panel controlled by the legislature’s leadership.

Rea Hederman of the free-market Buckeye Institute says that Medicaid expansion will be a long-term “fiscal drag on our state.” (The federal government picked up the entire tab at first, but that drops to 90 percent.) But Hederman praised Kasich for cutting taxes, freezing green-energy mandates, and trying (but failing) to curb the power of public-employee unions. (Kasich signed a bill in 2011 that went further than legislation in Wisconsin to curtail public unions’ collective bargaining power, but it was repealed 62 percent to 38 percent in a referendum before it could take effect.)

Kasich suggests that there’s not much of a contradiction between what he was saying about welfare in the 1990s and what he’s saying about Medicaid now. He says work requirements for Medicaid are fine and that Medicaid and Medicare need to be reformed to balance the budget. But he’s vague on specifics. “I have no idea what Paul Ryan proposed” to reform Medicare, Kasich says. “If you just move from a fee-for-service to coordinated-care system as a default option, that would be a really good thing. . . . I don’t have a Medicare plan right in front of me. But we would dig in and say what works and what doesn’t, what’s acceptable and what isn’t.”

The common thread between Kasich’s case for cutting welfare in the 1990s and expanding welfare now is the moralism behind each argument. It’s this rhetoric, when aimed at other Republicans, along with his criticism of Trump, that makes Kasich anathema to so many GOP voters and leaders—not his ideological heresies. Trump himself, after all, campaigned on not touching entitlements, called the House GOP bill to partially repeal Obamacare “mean,” and endorsed an assault weapons ban and a bill to protect “Dreamers” in various White House meetings (comments that were never acted upon). Kasich seems to recognize that they both color outside the lines when it comes to conservative dogma. “I understand Trump’s negative populism,” he says. But “I’m a positive populist. I’ve always been a populist.” His heterodoxy certainly seems to have worked to his political advantage in Ohio: He won a second term as governor by 31 points in 2014; four years earlier he squeaked by with a 2-point victory.

Kasich frequently talks about the need to restore certain moral values and civility. These goals are sometimes in tension, as demonstrated by the implication that those who opposed expanding Medicaid are immoral. “It was probably not right for me to do it because it put people off,” Kasich tells me, referring to the Saint Peter soundbite. “At the same time, I didn’t tell you to feel like I’m judging you. . . . But if I had thought it was going to be really offensive, I would not use that.”

* *

The breakdown of civil society and the need for a moral awakening were themes of Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign and remain so in his speeches today. But his rhetoric is closer to moralistic therapeutic deism than anything offered by the religious right. “One of the most important things in life is to like yourself,” Kasich told high-school students during his townhall at Stuyvesant.

The first half of Kasich’s 7,500-word final state of the state address, delivered on March 7 to the Ohio legislature, was a scattershot survey of theology, philosophy, and politics. “In uncertain times, we reflect, and I just want us to go back for a moment to those days when many of us were in college. Do you remember being in the dorm?” Kasich said. “Do you remember late at night when you would look at your friends and you would say, ‘What’s life all about? Why are we here? What is our purpose? What is my responsibility as a human being?’ ”

He then devoted a few words or a few sentences to (take a deep breath): Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Camus, Kierkegaard, Locke, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Wilberforce, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Natan Sharansky, Ronald Reagan, whistleblowers at Wells Fargo and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and heroes from recent American tragedies in Houston, Puerto Rico, Las Vegas, and Parkland.

“We, human beings, created by the Lord, we’re unique and we are made in our creator’s image. That’s what the theologians say, and I buy it,” Kasich said. “When we’re made in God’s image, there’s a natural pull to all of us to reflect the traits of our creator’s character. Think about it. Because we know Him, we know what His character is. We know what His values are. And, folks, these are not these hot-button issues that we yell and scream at each other about. Those hot-button issues in many ways have driven the young away from these kinds of considerations.”

The values Kasich wanted to talk about were not the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but the importance of love, humility, forgiveness, responsibility, and justice—values he’d acted upon by lowering the “number of people who are uninsured” and focusing on drug addiction, mental health, criminal justice and prison reform, human trafficking, and creating jobs. “Live a life a little bigger than ourselves,” Kasich said. “And you know what it’s all about is human connectedness, that we’re connected to one another.”

“I’m just calling for an awakening. I don’t want you to go thinking I’m trying to lead some crusade here or something like that,” Kasich tells me over lunch in Manhattan. “When I talk about an awakening, I’m talking about sort of a movement of manners and respect. . . . I haven’t studied them, but they have happened, right? They have happened throughout human history.”

“How did Wilberforce do that [change social mores in Britain]? I don’t know how,” he says. But “the problem with talking about this awakening in religious terms is religion has been so discredited that the minute—if you start with that—it gets you nowhere.”

That’s not to say Kasich isn’t interested in religion. He’s enthusiastic about dinner plans that evening in Manhattan with Fleming Rutledge, an 81-year-old Episcopal priest, author, and theologian. Most recently, he’s been reading about Gnosticism, a Christian heresy, in one of Rutledge’s books. “It’s a non-flesh, non-body—it’s kind of a metaphysical—is that the right, word, metaphysical?” he asks. “It’s spirit-based,” he says. “It’s that the flesh and the body can do no good, so it’s all about the spirit. It’s been around forever—forever—and I think it’s an evolving definition of what it means.”

“It’s one of the early parts of this book I’m reading. Man, I read some weird stuff.”

The conversation circles back to Kasich’s state of the state speech. “I made a speech, I talked about these virtues, and right away a newspaper article comes out and says, ‘Well, is he really living up to them?’ ” Kasich says between bites of a caprese salad. “The answer is no! The reason nobody wants to talk about it is because the minute you talk about it somebody calls you a hypocrite.”

Kasich’s values rhetoric is unusual for a politician and may not appeal to conservatives who would like more social solidarity without feeling like they have to literally hug their neighbors. But it’s just weird enough to convince you it’s authentic and sincere. It’s a message he seems intent on preaching in 2019 and 2020, one way or another.

When I ask him if he can imagine doing anything that would have as much of an impact as running for president, he replies: “You kiddin’? Look at—you ever watch YouTube? Look at the YouTube channels. Look at the ability of people to maintain an amazing voice using social media. And if you combine social media with traditional media, including radio or whatever, yeah, you can have a very big voice.”

John McCormack is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard .