A long-time Ohio conservative operative tells Breitbart News that the state’s Republican Gov. John Kasich “appears almost delusional in his absolute conviction that he is going to be the next president.”
Jack Boyle, the co-founder of PutGrowthFirst.com and a resident of suburban Cleveland, adds that the Ohio governor has put out the word throughout the party nobody should do anything to support GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Because of the governor’s hostility to Trump, the state party’s apparatus is only working on so-called down-ticket races, that is it is working to help everyone, except Trump, Boyle says.
The county party chairman are caught between the wishes of the governor and the Republican voters, who support Trump–and they are unwilling to jump off the cliff with him, Boyle said.
In the absence of Republican Party support, the National Rifle Association has stepped up to provide field operations, he said.
The Ohio GOP is notoriously bad at its ground game, so with the NRA, the presidential nominee may have a better ground game than the one the party gave Mitt Romney in 2012 or Sen. John McCain in 2008, he said.
In the 2012 election, President Barack Obama beat Romney with 51 percent of the vote to Romney’s 48 percent.
Ohio has 18 votes in the Electoral College.
Boyle said when the lewd tape from 2005 that showed Trump speaking with direct language about his failed courtship with a married woman and his experience with women, who want to spent time with celebrities, hit the whole state was rocked by it.
In the wake of the tape scandal, some Ohio Republican Members of Congress, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. David Joyce and Rep. Patrick Tiberi repudiated their support of Trump, he said.
“There is now a very vocal grassroots outrage,” he said
Many people are now saying they will leave those lines blank, rather than vote for Portman, Joyce and Tiberi.
“Portman had opened up a double-digit lead,” he said. “I don’t know of any polling of the Senate race since then, but the outrage has been very, very vocal.”
In the end, Boyle said he expects Trump to win Ohio.
“But, frankly, I expected Romney to win Ohio,” he said. “I saw Romney and Ryan at 1:30 p.m., on Election Day in 2012 in our victory center in Cleveland, and they thought they were going to win Ohio.” Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) ran as the vice-presidential nominee with Romney.
The operative said that in March 2013, a study of the 2012 campaign in Ohio showed that if Republican turnout had matched Republican turnout in the previous three presidential elections in just 10 counties, Romney would have won.
“It wasn’t voter fraud, which there was a lot, it wasn’t the Obama turnout machine, which was substantial, it was that Republicans did not vote that caused Romney to lose,” he said.
“I never thought anyone could poll worse than John McCain, until Romney came along,” he said.
“My predictive ability is very limited,” he said. “I am very hopeful and I am very encouraged.”