Brokered convention

'Cockamamie': Kasich campaign rejects talk of brokered convention

By Kyle Cheney

John Kasich’s campaign rejected suggestions Sunday that it’s pursuing a strategy to knock out Donald Trump at a brokered Republican National Convention in July.

During a conference call with reporters, the Ohio governor’s senior strategist John Weaver called the idea “cockamamie” and dismissed a New York Times story describing Kasich advisers quietly seeking support for the strategy. Instead, Weaver described a path — one that many establishment Republicans have in turn described as cockamamie — to hang on by a thread through unfriendly Super Tuesday contests and out-wait other faltering rivals to wind up in a head-to-head race with Trump.

Then, he said, Kasich could win the nomination on the convention’s first ballot.

The scenario requires Ted Cruz to underperform on Tuesday, when seven Southern states, including his home state of Texas, go to the polls. It also requires Marco Rubio to lose his home state of Florida on March 15 and Kasich to win Ohio simultaneously. In that scenario, Weaver said Kasich would likely be the only candidate with a path to take on Trump. Weaver also rejected the Times’ contention that Mitt Romney — the 2012 GOP presidential nominee — had urged Kasich to exit the race.

“No one has come to the governor or to myself or any other member of the campaign leadership and asked him to do anything [other] than what he’s doing,” Weaver said.

Kasich trails badly in polls of nearly every Super Tuesday state. His campaign has outlined a plan to win delegates in Massachusetts and Virginia — both of which have low thresholds to qualify — and turn his attention to Michigan, which votes March 8. But even in those more favorable states, polls show Kasich trailing Trump badly, and he’s relying on the uncertain prospect of a shrinking field to help deliver more support his way. (Kasich did get a boost Sunday in Michigan — an endorsement from the Detroit Free Press.)

“I know from polling that if it was one-on-one in Michigan, we’d beat Donald Trump by 20 points,” he said. But there’s virtually no chance of that one-on-one scenario. Cruz and Rubio are expecting to jockey for second- and third-place finished across the dozen Super Tuesday states, in many cases scoring delegates of their own and leaving little reason for them to exit the race immediately.

Weaver declined to say when the campaign would begin airing TV ads in Michigan, a state that Kasich has compared to New Hampshire in importance. Kasich surged to a second-place finish in New Hampshire on Feb. 9, a distant second to Trump but a strong enough showing to give him an edge over other establishment-backed candidates.