HOLLIS — “Kasich has been pushed aside,” Sue Mitchell, an undecided Brookline, New Hampshire, voter said as she waited for the governor of Ohio to arrive at a townhall here. “I don’t know, he’s not dynamic.”
Which seemed a shame to her, since she likes the guy, along with Chris Christie, who Mitchell, a 70-year-old retired lab tech, said impressed her with his off-the-cuffness. She also stood for six hours to see Donald Trump speak — “he has good points but he’s so abrasive.”
Seated next to Mitchell, clutching a Dunkin Donuts coffee, Jane Edmonds, a 66-year-old retiree from Hollis, said she was voting for Kasich, and while she doesn’t like Trump, she said doubted his second place finish in Iowa would affect New Hampshire voters — “I think New Hampshire thinks for itself.”
Kasich’s townhall rhetoric seemed to be betting on this no-labels streak; he talked about his postal worker/coal miner lineage and his both-sides-of-the-aisle pragmatism throughout his career, fielding questions with a ticking clock of the national debt at his back. “The Democrats and the Republicans both like to spend, it’s just that the Republicans feel bad doing it,” he said, earning a small chuckle from the crowd.
It was a talk largely missing the big applause lines that are so frequent at other candidate events in this big personality-driven GOP race. Kasich’s style is a bit loping and idiosyncratic; it takes him a while to circle back to his talking points since he likes to take his metaphors and anecdotes out for a stroll first — his comparison of pepperoni pizza to the state of public education was a little hard to follow.
Where he did elicit applause and a moment of connection with the audience was towards the end of his remarks when he touched on the state’s drug problem and about the need to speak with people who are “lonely and isolated” who “want to share their victories and defeats — we need to connect again,” he said.
Asked by reporters after the event about the mood of the Republican electorate, Kasich tried dismiss the notion that it was a time of anger in the party. “I’ve done 99 town hall meetings and people come and many of them say they’re hopeful,” he said. “This whole business that people are anti experience or angry, I dont find that.”
But, he said, “maybe that’s because I tell them the story of what can be done.”
The Washington Post reported today that Bernie Sanders will head to New York City this weekend to make a not totally surprise cameo on “Saturday Night Live.” (This week’s show is hosted by Larry David, whose impersonation of Sanders is Tina-Fey-as-Sarah-Palin-level accurate.) At 5 p.m. today, Sanders is scheduled to go the New Hampshire Democratic party’s McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club dinner, along with Hillary Clinton. After that, according to a New England news station, his next planned New Hampshire event is a rally on the night of the primary. He’s done campaigning here.
Clinton is also going to be leaving town this weekend — she’s headed to Flint, Michigan, on Sunday to talk to residents about the ongoing water crisis there — but she’ll be coming back to New Hampshire on Monday for a get-out-the-vote event.
The reason both Democratic candidates appear to be phoning it in is clear: Sanders has a tremendous advantage in New Hampshire, and neither candidate has much to gain by expending additional resources here. In fact, both of our primary forecastsput Sanders’s chances of winning at greater than 99 percent.
