Power Up: John Kasich is at a fork in the road. But is Ohio?

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FORK OFF: John Kasich, Ohio’s former Republican governor, spoke last night at the Democratic National Convention, urging Americans to cast aside partisanship and vote for Joe Biden. 

Kasich is the most high-profile Republican yet to publicly oppose President Trump, arguing the president’s actions have betrayed the party of Lincoln. “Many of us cannot imagine four more years,” he said in pretaped remarks filmed at the intersection of two gravel roads on a grassy field. 

Kasich was not the only turncoat: the opening night of the virtual meeting featured testimonials from Trump-turned-Biden voters around the country. Former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, ex-Rep. Susan Molinari (R-N.Y.), and former Senate candidate Meg Whitman were among the other moderate Republicans who vouched for Biden, providing moderate Republicans with a permission slip to defect from Trump. 

• Key quote: “I’m a lifelong Republican but that attachment holds second place to my responsibility to my country,” said Kasich. “That’s why I’ve chosen to appear at this convention. In normal times, something like this would probably never happen, but these are not normal times.”  
• “The stakes in this election are greater than any in modern times,” he warned before attacking Trump. “Many of us have been deeply concerned about the current path that we’ve been following for the past four years. It’s a path that led to division, dysfunction, irresponsibility and growing vitriol between our citizens. Continuing to follow that path will have terrible consequences for America’s soul because we’re being taken down the wrong road by a president who has pitted one against the other. ”

But Democratic strategists say Kasich’s Biden bear hug doesn’t mean Ohioans will do the same. 

Much like the Republican Party, Ohio has undergone a transformation of its own over the last decade. With a population that’s older, whiter, and less educated than the rest of the country, it’s no longer a bellwether state but one expected to vote for Republicans in presidential contests. Trump handily won Ohio in 2016 by a margin of 8 percentage points — a humiliating defeat for Hillary Clinton after Barack Obama carried the state twice in 2008 and 2012 — and Biden’s path to 270 electoral votes doesn’t wend through Ohio.

Kasich, say strategists and campaign staff who spoke with Power Up, isn’t proof the Buckeye State could turn blue, but more symbolic of the exodus of affluent and educated national Republicans who are testing the NeverTrump waters and may be persuaded to support Biden.

• “I think everyone agrees that Kasich is a symbol of bipartisanship — not just a symbol of Ohio as a whole,” John Anzalone, a pollster for the Biden campaign told Power Up. “And a symbol of where voters are.” 
• “Independents and Democrats — but also Republican voters — want to get to a point where Democrats and Republicans can work together to get things done. It’s clear that voters don’t think this president can do that and Biden’s experience and leadership gives them hope that real things can get done that are impactful for working families,” Anzalone added.

Yet: The Ohio race has tightened in recent months and Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), hold a double-digit lead nationally over Trump and Vice President Pence. Democrats are urging Biden to consider playing there despite a general feeling the state is still a longshot for them.

Kasich, who ran for president in 2016 and then declined to vote for Trump, is representative of the kind of crossover moderate Republican the Biden campaign is hoping to showcase during this week’s convention –  and scoop up.

• “He’s a good ambassador for Democrats to the kinds of voters who don’t like Trump but are also not Democrats and do not think of themselves as Democrats,” Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, told us. 

Zell Miller, a similarly cantankerous politician from Georgia who passed away in 2018, spoke at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. The Democratic senator had soured on then-Democratic nominee John Kerry and praised George W. Bush as “a strong commander in chief who is guided by the right principles,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported at the time. He’s believed “to be the first elected official from one major party to keynote the other party’s convention,” and was valued by the Bush campaign for broadening the nominee’s appeal. 

• “I’m not going to tell you that [Kasich] moves votes but the symbolism is important and the Biden campaign is smart to include him,” Kondik added.
• “It’s great to see Kasich as a speaker at our convention,” former Gov. James J. Blanchard of Michigan, a Biden delegate and a Democrat, told the New York Times’s Peter Baker. Kasich “represents that group of independents and moderate Republicans” that Biden is seeking to win over.
• “Somebody has to start being willing to break down this tribalism,” Kasich told Baker in an interview prior to Monday’s address. “I don’t think that I will achieve that, but somebody’s got to start. Somebody has to be able to begin to say, ‘No, you’ve got to take off your partisan hat, and you’ve got to realize we’re Americans.’”

It’s unclear just how many disaffected Republicans will eventually jump ship. But Biden’s competitive standing in a state Democrats previously wrote off is an unexpected marker both the Biden and Trump campaigns have made note of.

• “‘I don’t think we’re losing this campaign.’ He told me the polling averages didn’t show Biden winning Ohio. I said that was wrong. Well, Paduchik said, the RealClearPolitics average didn’t show Biden winning. I told him that was wrong too — that I happened to be looking at that particular website as we spoke. Even Rasmussen, Trump’s preferred polling outfit, had Trump down by five, I said. ‘No,’ Paduchik said, Rasmussen didn’t have a poll like that. When I said it sure did, that I was looking right at it, Paduchik said he couldn’t speak to that poll since he hadn’t reviewed it himself. Either way, he said, the polls were silly, based as they are on the premise that they measure how people would vote if the election were held today. ‘Well, the election is not today!’ he said. ‘We haven’t had our debates and our convention yet. It’s sort of a fantasy guess.’”

Reality check: Still, the Biden campaign hasn’t invested nearly as much as the Trump operation in Ohio. It expanded its advertising push there at the beginning of August — one of 15 battleground states where the campaign is airing ads. NBC News’s Mike Memoli reported the buy was a “seven-figure campaign” airing “in the Toledo and Youngstown markets through the Democratic National Convention.” 

And: Despite the confidence from Ohio Democrats, you’d be hard pressed to find a Biden staffer willing to go on the record predicting an Ohio win. But many will acknowledge that current polls in a state Biden doesn’t need to win should alarm the Trump campaign. 

• A Quinnipiac University poll of Ohio registered voters released at the end of June showed Biden with a slight edge over Trump; a Fox News poll from June showed Biden two points ahead of Trump; and a CBS News poll released at the end of July showed Trump one point ahead of Biden in the state.
• “The fact that [Biden’s] close in Ohio, Georgia and Iowa — it confirms the national trends,” a senior Biden adviser told Power Up. “This is what happens when you have an incumbent president with a negative job rating and well over a majority of people who have no chance of voting for him. Biden is the type of candidate who is viewed as moderate and has experience and can win in Macomb, Michigan as well as Mahoning County, Ohio.” 
• “I do think that Ohio is very close right now,” a Democratic lawmaker close to the Biden campaign told Power Up. “It’s 50-50 but for Democrats but it’s hardly a necessary state to win. If it turns out that we do win Ohio by a point or two on election night, we’ve had already most likely won because it means we’d win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by even bigger margins.”

Trump trashed Kasich aboard Air Force One on Monday night ahead of the DNC, calling him a “loser as a Republican and he’ll be a loser as a Democrat.” Trump has faced additional headwinds in the state as Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) decisively locked down his state as the coronavirus pandemic raged in a clear split with Trump’s dismissal of the virus. DeWine’s approval ratings at home jumped 31 points to an all-time high

The Trump campaign has “has laid out tens of millions of dollars for a fall advertising blitz” in Ohio, the Times’s Maggie Haberman reported earlier this month. 

• “On Jan. 1, there was not a serious consultant on the Republican or Democrat side who thought Ohio was an up-for-grabs presidential swing state,” Nicholas Everhart, the president of Content Creative Media, a Republican national ad-buying firm based in Ohio, told Haberman. “The economic fallout of the pandemic, though, seems to have caught Ohio up with Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, particularly in the Columbus and Cleveland suburbs,” Everhart added of the changing political tides. 

Ultimately, political strategists and academics view Ohio for what it is: whiter than the nation as a whole and with a large percentage of voters who lack a college degrees, Trump’s core demographic. 

• “One of my favorite sayings in politics is that trends are trends until they change,” GOP pollster Glen Bolger told us. “But I’m also not prepared to say Ohio is no longer a swing state. This year people are casting a wide net on the states that are up for grabs and Ohio still remains in the field of play for both parties. Things may change but when you’re down 8-12 points nationally … that means Ohio is in play. ”

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: Here’s the best of the rest from night one.

The speech was raw and emotional: “She sounded like a wounded citizen. She sounded like a woman in pain,” Robin Givhan reports.

• A line you will hear a lot today: “Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can: Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us,” she said, before quoting a line Trump used about covid-19 deaths in a recent interview: “It is what it is.” 

Former Obama speech write Jon Favreau:

Many Democrats were wondering where to buy Obama’s “Vote” necklace: 

A daughter who lost her father to covid-19 laced into the president: “His only pre-existing condition was that he trusted Donald Trump,” said Kristin Urquiza, whose father Mark Urquiza died in June. She previously blistered Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) for his handling of the virus in an obituary for her father that went viral.

• Urquiza’s speech reminds us of 2016 when Khizr Khan, whose son Army Capt. Humayun Khan was killed in Iraq, questioned whether then-candidate Trump had ever read the Constitution before pulling a copy out of his pocket. The raw rejoinder to Trump’s push of a ban on mainly Muslims entering the U.S. soon became one of the defining moments of that convention. (Khan made an appearance in last night’s opening sequence, too).

A powerful two minutes from the family of George Floyd: 

Sanders called for unity and also tore into Trump: “Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said. He also implored his supports to come together to back Biden this November, Chelsea Janes reports. “The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our economy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake,” the senator added.

One of his Senate colleagues gave the speech a rave review:

Jill Biden’s moment: “The Jill Biden who will address the Democratic National Convention [tonight] is playing a far more active role in her husband’s campaign than she has in his past two White House bids, in 1988 and 2008, according to close friends and confidants,” Jada Yuan and Annie Linskey report.

• She was intimately involved in Biden’s selection of a running mate: “So central was Jill Biden’s role in the process that the selection committee had presented their initial findings to the Bidens as a pair. With Jill’s input, Joe narrowed the field of more than 20 to the 11 whom he then interviewed one on one. Joe called the other contenders to tell them Harris was his choice, and Jill was the one calling the four selection committee co-chairs to tell them the news.”

AOC’s minute: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, will also speak tonight. She will reportedly have just one minute.

• “…the relegation of Ocasio-Cortez, who electrifies multiple parts of a Democratic base, to one meager minute, a segment that—unlike speeches by some other presenters—will be pre-recorded, isn’t just a snub,” New York Magazine’s Rebecca Traister writes. “The failure of a major political party to showcase one of its most talented politicians, a young person whose communicative reach and facility positions her to be among its leaders deep into our future, is self-sabotage.” 

The “reimagined roll call”: The traditional convention roll call goes virtual as delegates across 57 states and territories officially make Biden their party’s nominee.

• “Usually there are meetings and gatherings and lobbying and partying. But the main business is nominating the party’s candidate. Usually, thousands of delegates would gather in an arena. The delegation from each state is called upon, someone from the state extols its greatness and then announces how many of its delegates it’s pledging for each candidate. This year, that roll call will happen Tuesday, virtually, in 30 minutes,” our colleagues Terri Rupar and Amber Phillips report. 

There’s also plenty of star power this week:

And it wouldn’t be a Democratic event without the Boss:

THE OUTAKES: A virtual convention still featuring some live speeches means there will be some unguarded moments.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had some fun before her speech:

Sanders waived off his wife Jane’s attempts to correct his posture:

UNC ABANDONS IN-PERSON CLASSES AFTER VIRUS SPIKE: “The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the largest schools in the country to bring students to campus for in-person teaching, said that it will pivot to all-remote instruction for undergraduates after testing showed a pattern of rapid spread of the novel coronavirus,” Nick Anderson reports.

• The shift signals the challenges ahead for higher education: “177 cases of the dangerous pathogen had been confirmed among students, out of hundreds tested. Another 349 students were in quarantine, on and off campus, because of possible exposure to the virus.”

The student newspaper torched the university in an editorial: The Daily Tar Heel printed an editorial with a headline that used an expletive to make a play off of the virus clusters sprung up on campus, Paulina Firozi reports.

• “It is a mess,” Tar Heel editor in chief Anna Pogarcic told our colleague of why the f-bomb headline worked. “And I said, ‘You know what? Go for it. Print news, raise hell.’”

A CENTURY SINCE THE 19TH AMENDMENT: “On the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, we could think about life a full century ago. But we could also think about life 99 years ago, when the country first started to realize how much power voting women now had, and how they might choose to wield it. We could think about what the amendment changed and what it didn’t,” Monica Hesse wrote earlier this month.

Many women were left out of the historic moment: “The women who showed up to register to vote in the fall of 1920 confronted many hurdles. Racism was the most significant one,” Martha S. Jones, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins, wrote in National Geographic earlier this month.

Like mother, like son: History was almost delayed. The Tennessee Senate had easily passed the amendment, but the House was proving trickier. As activists swarmed Nashville, the House failed to delay a final vote on a 48-48 tie, but the deadlock was expected to continue. Harry T. Burn, who two years prior became the legislature’s youngest member, received a seven-page missive from his mother, Febb, a century ago today, that updated the lawmaker on family matters and included one last bit of lobbying.

• “Hurray and vote for Suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt,” she wrote her son. “ … I’ve been waiting to see how you stood but have not seen anything yet … Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt with her “Rats.”

But Burn was also a politician and his constituents opposed suffrage. There was also an election looming. 

• As the House clerk called the role, Burn quickly said “Aye.” He became the target of anti-suffragist attacks, including the false claim he was bribed for his vote. Hoping to address the “veiled intimidation,” Burn added a personal statement to the record, according to the East Tennessee Historical Society. He said he primarily changed his vote, “because I believe in full suffrage as a right.” He also added “I knew that a mother’s advice is always safest for a boy to follow …”

Drill plan for Alaskan refuge is finalized: “The Trump administration said it will open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, a move that will allow oil and gas rights to be auctioned off in the heart of one of the nation’s most iconic wild places. Achieving a goal Republicans have sought for 40 years, the action marks a capstone for an administration that has ignored calls to reduce fossil fuel consumption in the face of climate change,” Juliet Eilperin reports.

Trump says he’ll pardon someone today: The president told reporters the person will be “very, very important,” but it’s not former NSA contractor Edward Snowden or former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Former senior Trump administration official endorses Biden: Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff to former Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, accused Trump of being “one of the most unfocused and undisciplined senior executives I have ever encountered” in a video produced by Republican Voters Against Trump, CNN’s Jeremy Diamond, Jake Tapper and Michael Warren report.

• “I can attest that the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions,” Taylor wrote in a Post op-ed. In response, White House adviser Jared Kushner called Taylor “a nice kid,” adding the failure to build a wall and uphold other Trump-backed immigration policies is why the White House pushed out much of the Department of Homeland Security’s top leadership.