During an appearance Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, Kasich said a “number of people who live in the suburbs, including women who have traditionally been voting Republican, are very uncomfortable with” the harsh rhetoric from President Donald Trump and many GOP lawmakers.
“Where the Democrats fall short is, I have no idea what they for,” Kasich said. “I believe it will be a decent Democrat but it could be a big year if they stood for something.”
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“But they’re all screwed up too,” Kasich said. “Because the left wing is really dominating them just like the right wing is dominating the Republican Party.”
Kasich’s appearance on CNN capped off a weekend that featured a schedule more suitable for a presidential candidate in 2020 than governing Ohio.
He attended a posh reception Friday evening at the Kalorama home of David Bradley, owner of Atlantic Magazine and National Journal, a gathering which included Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner.
On Saturday night, he was a guest at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, although for the second consecutive year Trump skipped the event which includes Washington’s elite journalists and Hollywood celebrities.
Kasich did not say whether he would run for president in 2020, but he sketched out an independent path toward the presidency when he said “the hard left and the hard right” of the two parties “only absorb that they agree with. God bless them, maybe we can come back and rescue them later.”
“But there’s a big ocean of people in the middle who are up for grabs,” Kasich said. “These are people who are objective, these are people who are rationale, and these are people who seek the truth.”
He said he told people in casual conversations during the correspondents’ dinner not to “identify yourself. Be yourself, be an American, and care about being rationale, objective and seeking the truth because we are almost in a post-truth environment.”