by Nick Castele
It was a good night for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who defeated Donald Trump in the Buckeye State’s Republican primary.
Kasich won Ohio with 47 percent of the vote. Trump secured 36 percent, and Ted Cruz was far behind with 13 percent.
Speaking at Baldwin Wallace University last night, Kasich echoed a dominant theme in Ohio’s primary: economic anxiety.
“As I’ve traveled the country and I look into your eyes, you want to believe, you want to believe again that we can have job security,” he said. “You want to believe again that wages can rise.”
Kasich won nearly all of the state’s major metropolitan areas, and much in between. Trump, meanwhile, came out ahead in the east and the south—winning counties from the Youngstown area all through Appalachia to the edge of the Cincinnati area.
Kasich thanked Democrats who crossed party lines to vote for him. And while he didn’t address Trump by name, he offered a rebuttal to the billionaire’s style of campaigning.
“I will not take the low road to the highest office in the land,” Kasich said, to cheers from the crowd.
But it’s less clear what that road looks like. Ohio is the first state Kasich has won, and even with its 66 delegates, the governor is far behind Trump.
Still, that didn’t dampen Kasich’s ambitions for this campaign.
“We are going to go all the way to Cleveland and secure the Republican nomination,” he told the audience.
Whether that meant he was aiming for a contested convention, Kasich didn’t say.
As he ended his speech last night, a burst of confetti filled the room, and the governor disappeared into the crowd of his supporters.
