10:52

Ohio governor John Kasich, meanwhile, is in Greece, New York, where he is “running equal with Donald Trump” and where he says he will win more delegates than he has been winning, which has not been very many. Kasich is a way off the Republican pace, heading for what he hopes will be a contested convention.

John Kasich Photograph: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

“If we get blown out in the fall, which I think we could with Cruz or Trump, we could lose the Senate,” he says. He’s the man to stop that, he says.

He’s not biting on whether Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan might descend from the heavens on to such a contested convention and take the nomination – he is the second choice of most Trump and Cruz voters, he says. But he does invoke a figure with a certain place in Republican heaven, “old Honest Abe” – Lincoln – who went into his convention in 1860 “third or fourth” and ended up one of the greatest presidents of all.

Kasich continues:

I’m going to have more delegates than I have now and I am going to be viable. I am the only person who can beat Hillary Clinton in the fall. Are we going to nominate someone who isn’t viable? It’s nuts!

He can attract conservative Democrats, independents, he says. But he won’t attack Clinton herself. Everyone else will, John.

Kasich is now asked about North Carolina’s controversial anti-anti-discrimination law, which this week cost the state a Bruce Springsteen gig. Would he have signed it? “Probably not.” Religious institutions should be protected, Kasich says, but “when you get beyond that it can become … a contentious issue.”

“I wouldn’t have signed that law,” he says. “Nathan Deal, the governor of Georgia, vetoed another one… why do we have to write a law every time we turn around. Can’t we just get along with each other?”

Kasich, forever protesting his viability in the face of what Ben Carson would call “horrible numbers”, is perfecting a new mood in this campaign: the genially cross. The affably aggravated. The pleasantly peeved. He’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore but aw shucks, can’t everyone be nicer to each other? Call it what you will.