Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich suspended his presidential campaign ended two months ago, robbing the party's #NeverTrump forces of their last potential rallying point.

Nevertheless a hardy band of dead-enders continues to grasp for increasingly unlikely ways to stop former reality TV star Donald Trump from removing the "presumptive" from his current title of presumptive Republican nominee.

And wouldn't you know it, Kasich's suspended-but-still-kicking campaign wants to make sure people know that he's the strongest possible candidate in a new NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, which shows the dropped-out Kasich happens to be a much stronger opponent than Trump. Just, you know, in case.

This from an email the Kasich for America campaign committee sent out this morning:

Friend, in case you missed them, below are links to several recent articles highlighting Gov. John Kasich's efforts to help our party maintain the majority in the U.S. Senate and also about Gov. Kasich's popularity in national polls.

The first link that follows goes to a Politico article about Kasich trying to help embattled Ohio Sen. Rob Portman. The second is to the NBC poll, quoting a section explaining that the poll tested Kasich, 2012 nominee Mitt Romney and House Speaker Paul Ryan, and that Kasich performs the strongest of all.

Perhaps most surprising are the results of a Clinton vs. Kasich November match-up. Though the Ohio governor was only able to secure enough support during the primaries to win his home state of Ohio, he leads Clinton by 8 points – the same margin as Clinton's lead over Trump last week. Kasich's large lead over Clinton is mostly due to the fact that he pulls in more Democrats and Independents than either Ryan or Romney – who pull in similar numbers of partisans. Though 9 percent of Democrats would go for either Ryan or Romney, Kasich pulls over 15 percent of Democrats. And while Independents are more tepid in their support of Romney or Ryan (roughly 52 percent), nearly six-in-10 Independents would swing toward the more moderate Republican candidate in a general election scenario.

There's no additional comment. Just ... throwin' it out there, in case, you know, anyone was wondering about such things.

In a sense the results aren't terribly surprising. On paper the twice-elected, popular governor of the most important swing state in the union should have been the class of the GOP's crowded (but not deep) presidential field. But Kasich ran a diffident campaign and was only able to win one state – his own.

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That inconvenient fact would present a knotty problem for #NeverTrump efforts to replace Trump in a convention coup – the New Yorker having drubbed the Ohioan from sea to shining sea, such a switch would be an utterly undisguised, antidemocratic coup. It can at least be said of Ryan and Romney that they didn't lose to Trump; Kasich's primary record would strip away whatever absurd veneer of legitimacy the coup plotters might claim.

And as Hot Air's Allahpundit puts it:

They didn't win the primary fair and square. Trump did. If you want to test how other Republicans would do against Clinton, you're duty bound, I think, to emphasize in your phrasing of the question the "Dump Trump" mechanism by which it would happen; after all, there's no way around the fact that a convention coup would alienate some Republican voters by ousting Trump in a way some would view as undemocratic and illicit. (Especially with Trump complaining loudly and often afterward about how rigged the Republican system is.) That's a number that would be useful to know – how many GOPers who might otherwise vote for a Romney or a Ryan or a Kasich would stay home on principle to protest Trump being overthrown overboard in Cleveland?

Indeed, it would mean that obscure leaders of the party which loudly complains about unaccountable Washington bureaucrats claiming to know better than ordinary citizens would be asserting that they know better than the more than 13 million people who supported Trump.

And how exactly would that work? Lisa Desjardins of "NewsHour" has a thorough write-up of the anti-Trump forces' three-pronged attempt to save the party from its own voters' stupidity. (And no, Trump didn't win the nomination because of open primaries allowing independents to take over the nomination process.) First they hope to pass a set of convention rules which would allow delegates to vote for whomever they please, regardless of state and party rules binding them to vote for a specific candidate; second they're trying to achieve that result in court; and finally they're hoping to free the delegates simply by declaring them to be free (seriously).

If these seem like Hail Mary passes, well they are. The fact remains that the stop-Trump brigades were unwilling and/or unable to get their acts together in the primaries (in part because they couldn't settle on a not-Trump candidate), so it seems unlikely they can both suddenly do so and thread any of these three moving needles as the weeks turn to days before the convention opens.

I suppose they have one perverse thing going for them: While it's true that you can't beat someone with no one, it's probably easier to unite against that someone if his enemies aren't obliged to line up behind a single opponent at the same time.