Chrissie Thompson

cthompson@usatoday.com

MCKEES ROCKS, Pa. – The kids who grew up with John Kasich can’t understand why he’s a Republican.

The Ohio governor left this Pittsburgh-area steel town for college and never moved back. He made his living as a congressman, TV host and investment banker. He prospered.

“He always talks about his blue-collar roots, and everyone knows the Republicans got all the money,” said Joe O’Donnell, a 56-year-old McKees Rocks lifer who works in the furnace at Calgon Carbon.

O’Donnell, and others like him, wonder whether Kasich is still one of them.

Then O’Donnell piped back up.

“If it came down to between him, Trump and Hillary, I’d vote for him all day.”

“Can we throw Kasich in there?” agreed Sandy Schipani, a 61-year-old retired administrative assistant sitting down the bar from O’Donnell at the Norwood Inn, a watering hole in Kasich’s old neighborhood.

“Not because he was from here,” explained Schipani, who has never voted for a Republican in her life. “I like the way he talks. The way he addresses any issue is with respect and confidence. And he talks openly.”

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Kasich's pitch: Give me a chance to win over my neighbors

A Kasich, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton race is beyond even the word “hypothetical” at this point. Right now, voters won’t have both GOP front-runner Trump and Kasich on their November ballot. For Kasich to make it to the general election, he needs to pull off an upset in what would have to become a contested GOP convention in July in Cleveland.

Still, O’Donnell and Schipani are part of Kasich’s pitch. He says he could bring working-class Democrats like them into the party in November, if his Republican colleagues would just give him the chance. As evidence, he points to poll after poll in which he finishes ahead of Democratic front-runner Clinton.

But he hasn’t been able to pull those voters into the Republican primary. In Ohio, for instance, many blue-collar Buckeyes cast ballots for Trump. And the only presidential yard sign spotted last week in McKees Rocks was a Trump sign at the turnoff to the steep climb to Kasich’s boyhood home, side-by-side with signs for a local Democratic race.

Still, almost no one The Enquirer met in McKees Rocks supports Trump.

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“Do you want Trump and his Playboy Bunny wife in there?” O’Donnell said, calling the billionaire “the 1 percent.” Trump's wife, Melania, is a former model who has posed nude.

“I don’t care if he was a rich kid born with a golden spoon in his mouth. He says things I want to hear,” countered Ricky Natale, 59, when he was out of hearing of O'Donnell. Natale recently moved to McKees Rocks from nearby Robinson Township, after he was divorced and laid off from his job as a construction manager.

“The whole country needs changed," he said. "It’s bad right now."

Pennsylvania's April 26 primaries are closed to people from other parties. The McKees Rocks Democrats interviewed by The Enquirer might not support Trump, but they didn’t change their party registration to vote for the native son.

“Once a Democrat, always a Democrat,” said Diane Bell, 66, who taught 32 years in her hometown high school and lives on Kasich’s old street. “My father always said the Republicans never did anything for the common man.”

Still, these Democrats largely are dissatisfied with their primary choices. A few said they wouldn’t vote on April 26 because of it. Others said they would vote for Bernie Sanders, mostly because he isn’t Clinton.

“I just don’t trust her,” said Chris Miller, a 41-year-old warehouse worker, who doesn’t plan to vote at all.

A working-class borough along the Ohio River

If you’re wondering, McKees Rocks is everything Kasich says it is.

(Much of the area Kasich called home is technically in Stowe Township, but locals generally refer to the whole community as McKees Rocks.)

Most of the people The Enquirer interviewed had lived there since birth. It's still a working-class borough, and young people still get jobs at the steel mills or at the railroad on the southwestern banks of the Ohio River. Residents talk hopefully of more jobs headed to the area soon from a new terminal for moving freight between rail and trucks.

Nonetheless, McKees Rocks has changed since Kasich, a member of the high school's Class of 1970, left decades ago.

The population in McKees Rocks proper, a six-mile drive from downtown Pittsburgh, has fallen from 13,000 when Kasich lived there to about 6,000 now. The Mother of Sorrows Catholic Church where Kasich served as an altar boy and led hymns now stands empty, a few of its windows cracked. The area is fighting a heroin epidemic. On Tuesday, a gunman shot and wounded a high school student near the local Sto-Rox High School at dismissal time – the first time such an incident has happened, locals said.

Meanwhile, Kasich has long lived in a well-off suburb of Columbus, earning at least a six- figure income.

Bell pointed to how often Kasich cites McKees Rocks.

"He keeps saying, 'this is how I started.’ But I don’t know how it shaped him,” Bell said. “He was a Democrat and a blue-collar person. Now he floats on the other side. But I haven’t seen enough about him to see why he transitioned.”

Kasich often points to economic policy – low taxes, free markets, fewer regulations – and job creation when he talks about being a McKees Rocks Republican.

“If the wind blew the wrong way over in McKees Rocks, people found themselves out of work,” he said Thursday at the New York Republican Party’s annual gala in Manhattan. “The most important thing that public officials can do is to create economic growth and prosperity in the neighborhoods.”

'They say he had strong roots'

In McKees Rocks, your family matters. Kasich’s dad John, the mailman he’s always talking about? He really did mean something to people in the neighborhood.

“He’d stop at the house and have a cup of coffee,” said Karen Sappo, 67, who grew up around the corner from Kasich and now lives across the street from his childhood home. (Sappo still calls Kasich "Johnny" and says she would vote for him, but is no longer registered with any political party.)

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Bell, the retired teacher, was a few years ahead of Kasich in school. “My friends around here, they say he had strong roots, family ties,” she said.

Kasich grew up in a two-story, red-brick home on Elizabeth Avenue, which crests the area’s highest point. A cousin lives there now.

When he was a child, the street was a distance from some of the lower-income parts of McKees Rocks, and it still is. The homes have maintained their postwar vibe, complete with old-fashioned awnings. Paint is peeling on some. Yards are well-maintained, and a Cadillac and a Jaguar – complete with a mini-Everlast glove hanging from the rearview mirror – graced the street last week.

Listen to residents talk about McKees Rocks’ decline, and you’ll recognize phrases from Kasich’s presidential stump speech.

“I blame it on the cell phones and technology and everything else. Kids don’t go out and play. Everyone’s too busy now,” said Miller, the warehouse worker.

Told that he sounds like Kasich, who often grabs an audience member’s cell phone to talk about the speed of life and suggest that people should connect with their neighbors more, Miller said: “It’s McKees Rocks. It’s the way we grew up. Dinner was at 5, and you were there.”

Enquirer reporter Jessie Balmert and the Associated Press contributed to this report.