Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Clinging to Kasich

It's a sign of desperation in the ring:

"Why Kasich is the unlikely linchpin in GOP’s plan to stop Trump" by Annie Linskey Globe Staff  March 09, 2016

GROSSE POINTE, Mich. — At a town hall-style meeting here, John Kasich singled out a group of students in the audience and ruminated on the importance of standing up to bullies.

He then criticized Israel?

“The key to life is finding your purpose and doing it,” he said, walking over to them with a microphone in hand. “Sometimes it’s standing in between the person that’s being bullied and saying: ‘Stop it.’ That changes the world, you know that?”

Palestinians have a whole reception committee waiting for you in Gaza, Johnny.

Over the next week, the larger purpose of the Ohio governor’s own campaign is shaping up along similar lines: Mainstream Republicans want Kasich to be the person who stands up to the bully in the 2016 primary, Donald Trump.

Oh.

The Ohio governor hasn’t won a single primary contest in 2016, and, his only previous signs of strength have been second-place finishes in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont. He is so far behind in the delegate count that he has virtually no chance of claiming the nomination — unless he somehow prevailed at a brokered convention.

Democrats have a say.

Despite all that, the Republican establishment sees Kasich as the unlikely linchpin of its strategy to derail Trump.

That sunk any chance he had of winning anything.

The party was counting on Kasich to use his Michigan performance Tuesday as a springboard to winning his delegate-rich home state of Ohio next week — denying Trump a big boost in delegates.

Trump prevailed in Michigan Tuesday night. Kasich and Senator Ted Cruz were battling for second place, according to early returns.

The real test for Kasich comes on March 15. Ohio and Florida are the key prizes among the six contests that day. It will be Kasich’s moment: The brunt of the argument for his candidacy so far is that he can deliver his home state.

Is that how low the bar has been dropped? 

Winning your home state makes you a viable candidate for nomination and the general election? 

You are supposed to win your home state. 

Had Al Gore won his Florida never matters.

To stem Trump’s accumulation of delegates and possibly block his path to the nomination, Republicans not only need Kasich to win Ohio, but also for Senator Marco Rubio of Florida to win his home state. If Trump wins both delegate-rich, winner-take-all states, he will be well on his way to accumulating the 1,237 delegates required and will be almost impossible to stop before the GOP convention in Cleveland.

Rubio is so far back in the polls in Florida that Kasich, who is running even with Trump in Ohio, has the better chance of making this novel strategy work. 

As we saw in Michigan, those don't mean a thing. He can bounce back.

“Kasich has no mathematical chance to get enough delegates to win,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist who ran Mitt Romney’s 2012 operation in Ohio.

“Clearly his strategy is about forcing a contested convention, and getting it to the floor, and convincing delegates that putting an Ohio governor on the ballot is a smart way of winning the White House.”

Jennings added: “He thinks he’ll have more friends on the floor than Donald Trump.”

One of those friends is, oddly, Romney. The two had a tense relationship in 2012. But on Tuesday, Romney unleashed a robocall to Michigan voters, urging them to support Kasich.

Another theory about Kasich’s strategy goes like this: If he can’t beat Trump, he could always join him.

After what happened to Chris Christie and all the abuse he took?

In a contested convention, it’s possible that Kasich’s delegates — if added to Trump’s — would be enough to push Trump over the top and win the nomination. Under that scenario, the country could see him as a vice presidential running mate.

Or whatever position Kasich might want.

Kasich was first elected governor in 2010 and won reelection by a 30-percentage point margin. He’s stayed popular in his home state even as his ambitions broadened, enjoying a 62 percent approval rating as of October.

Like I said above, what good are the polls after Michigan? 

You can't have it both ways, guys. I know you want to, but....

In this campaign, he’s tried to blaze a path as the reasonable adult who doesn’t roll in the mud with the other candidates.

I don't know about that.

He’s the only candidate in the field who hasn’t mounted a sustained campaign of verbal insults against Trump, though his super PAC was among the first to run ads against him in Ohio and New Hampshire last year.

Trump has offered some kind words to Kasich — and tangled with him late last year only after reports that Kasich’s super PAC was preparing a larger onslaught of ads. The news stories prompted a tweet storm from Trump in which the GOP front-runner derided Kasich as a “dud” who wasn’t getting traction.

So while Trump has grabbed attention with proposals to wall off Mexico and ban Muslims, Kasich’s biggest moment sprang from his capacity for empathy.

Last month at an event at Clemson University in South Carolina, a young man stood up and said his life has been difficult: An adult close to him — a “second father” — had committed suicide. His parents had recently divorced, and his father had lost his job.

I was told he skipped South Carolina.

“I was in a really dark place for a long time,” the man said. “I was pretty depressed. But I found hope. I found it with the Lord, and my friends, and now I’ve found it in my presidential candidate who I support. And I’d really appreciate one of those hugs you’ve been talking about.” 

OMG, he's comparing Kasich to Jesus!

As the man spoke, Kasich stepped down off the stage and embraced him for a full 17 seconds, patting him on the back as the audience applauded.

Has the feel of a staged and scripted event!

In Michigan this week, Kasich was just as free with the hugs, reaching over a barrier to wrap his arms around a young woman who stood up to tell him she’d had a rough year.

“What you’re seeing is genuine and real,” said Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, a Republican politician who has known Kasich for nearly four decades. “He has a real heart for the underdog.”

Then the Palestinians are going to love his presidency.

A pivotal part of Kasich’s gubernatorial record is his decision to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, accepting millions in federal funds that many conservative governors turned down as a way of protesting President Obama’s health care plan.

And this somehow makes him popular and a person that can represent the Republicans?

He’s defended his decision in religious terms. “When I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor,” he said, according to local news reports.

As long as you ain't in a union!

Kasich championed a law to restrict collective bargaining among public service unions early in his tenure. The measure went to Ohio voters on a ballot, and they slapped it down. 

!!!!!! 

But he sure is popular at home!

On the campaign trail, he positions himself as the mature populist....

Meaning he isn't one!

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And about that health plan he brought them:

"Critics say high deductibles make insurance ‘unaffordable’" by Tracy Jan Globe Staff  November 16, 2015

COLUMBUS, Ohio — When President Obama’s landmark health care law ushered in a slew of new insurance options in 2013, the Andersons could not wait to sign up.

Roger Anderson, 54, a formerly uninsured construction worker, has a bad back and a bad heart. He and his wife are still paying for his earlier heart surgery and feared another crisis could ruin them.

“This law was going to give people a chance,” said Cassaundra Anderson, 44, a freelance proof reader.

But in April, when Roger Anderson fell while hiking and hurt his shoulder, he discovered, to his dismay, that simply being insured was not enough. The Andersons’ mid-tier plan, which costs them $875 a month, requires them to meet a $7,000 deductible before insurance payments kick in.

“We can’t afford the Affordable Care Act, quite honestly,” said Cassaundra Anderson, whose family canvassed for Obama in their neighborhood, a Republican stronghold outside Cincinnati. “The intention is great, but there is so much wrong. . . . I’m mad.”

The Andersons’ experience echoes that of hundreds of thousands of newly insured Americans facing sticker shock over out-of-pocket costs. Although the law survived two Supreme Court challenges, it could still be on the line in the 2016 presidential election, posing a significant political barrier to Democrats in this critical battleground state, which includes both conservative rural sections of Appalachia and diverse cities.

Obama and Dems are touting it!!

The problem experienced by the Andersons is particularly acute in Ohio, which has the fourth-largest number of people enrolled in high-deductible insurance plans in the country, after Texas, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s trade association based in Washington.

Now that the law’s major provisions are in place, the outcry over cost has prompted Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, to call for changes to Obama’s signature domestic achievement.

“This will be an issue at least one more time in the 2016 election. It could absolutely still hurt Democrats,” said Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health. “Polls about the Affordable Care Act have a considerable amount of middle-income people who say either the program has done nothing for them or actually hurt them.”

But this was four months ago, and doesn't fit with the current narrative needed to stop Trump.

Governor John Kasich, like other Republicans running for the party’s presidential nomination, blames rising insurance costs on Obama’s 2010 health reform law and has called for its repeal.

Umm.... then why did you bring it to the state?

Clinton defends the Affordable Care Act on the campaign trail but is pledging to lower out-of-pocket costs including deductibles and making affordable health care a “basic human right.” Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist challenging Clinton for the Democratic nomination, says Obama’s health law does not go far enough and advocates for a “Medicare-for-all” single-payer system instead.

I used to believe in single-payer, but after more than five years you can forget it coming from this corrupt, bankrupt government that can't even manage the VA.

The percentage of Ohioans who view the law unfavorably is higher than in the nation as a whole, especially among independents and Democrats, according to new data from the annual Ohio Health Issues Poll. Nearly half of Ohioans do not like the law, compared with the 42 percent national figure reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation in October.

And yet the narrative surrounding it has been that of SUCCESS!

Somehow Kasich remains popular throughout this.

“Unfortunately, what we are headed toward now is universal crappy health insurance,” said Dr. Budd Shenkin, a California pediatrician who wrote the American Academy of Pediatrics policy on high-deductible plans, which he calls nefarious. “It’s just not a good deal for people,” he said.

The Obama administration, in response to the criticism, acknowledges that high deductibles are an “important issue” but says the problem is part of longstanding insurance trends.

We will be taking a look at those below.

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services points out that the law, for the first time, caps the out-of-pocket costs families pay to $13,700. It recently introduced an online “cost calculator” that gives those shopping for insurance a fuller picture of their total out-of-pocket costs.

That is not making me feel better.

The Affordable Care Act, while providing coverage to millions of previously uninsured Americans, does nothing to turn the tide away from high-deductible plans. The government provides subsidies that lower premiums and out-of-pocket costs for people with incomes below 250 percent of the federal poverty line, individuals making less than $30,000 a year. More than half of those buying insurance through the marketplace receive subsidies to offset copays and deductibles, according to the administration.

But those with more moderate incomes receive no help. Mandated by the law to buy coverage, they most often opt for high-deductible plans as a way to make their monthly premium payments more manageable. And they end up making medical decisions much like they did when they were uninsured, advocates say — by putting off care.

In fact, the growing use and size of deductibles as a way to lower premiums “threatens to undermine the gains Americans have made in coverage since 2014,” according to a September report by The Commonwealth Fund on the affordability of marketplace plans.

Cost concerns have lead tens of thousands of the newly insured to drop their Affordable Care Act plans and opt for free or discounted care at community health clinics.

Or even worse (more on it below).

Consumer advocates worry that the numbers will increase as the trend toward high deductibles worsens.

Cassaundra Anderson has been bombarded by a slew of e-mails reminding her to reenroll when the 2016 sign-up period for marketplace plans begins in November. She is not certain the family will re-up. Their premium next year would jump to more than $1,000 a month.

“We’re in the process of looking at going without insurance,” she said, calculating that the family will be better off financially just paying the $2,000 tax penalty for not abiding by the law’s mandate. “What am I even paying these insurance people for? Why should we reenroll?”

She figures that the amount the couple pays toward their insurance premium could instead go toward paying off her husband’s latest round of medical bills, now tallying $6,700. The mounting debt has Roger Anderson choosing to forgo the twice-weekly physical therapy prescribed by his doctor — and losing muscle mass as a consequence — because he can’t afford the $200-a-month copay. He’s also skipping a follow-up MRI of his back.

This may not be the right time to mention it, but maybe you could get a loan?

Cassaundra Anderson said she still plans on voting for whoever the Democratic nominee for president will be. “Republicans who have fought this law tooth and nail are not going to try to make it better,” she said.

Maybe it should be scrapped.

But independent swing voters may not be as forgiving. “If they are having the experience we’re having, they are going to say, ‘This is a lot of doo-doo,’ ” she said....

I was wondering what it was I was reading.

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Of course, premiums can change a lot in four months:

"US will require health care networks to be more transparent next year" by Robert Pear New York Times   March 07, 2016

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, responding to consumer complaints, said it would begin rating health insurance plans based on how many doctors and hospitals they include in their networks.

At the same time, the maximum out-of-pocket costs for consumers under the Affordable Care Act will increase next year to $7,150 for an individual and $14,300 for a family, the administration said. Consumer advocates said those costs could be a significant burden for middle-income people who need a substantial amount of care.

Under new rules to be published Tuesday in the Federal Register, insurers will still be allowed to sell health plans with narrow networks of providers. But consumers will know in advance what they are getting because the government will attach a label indicating the breadth of the network for each plan sold on HealthCare.gov.

I wish they had never gotten involved.

About 12.7 million people signed up or had their coverage automatically renewed in the third annual open enrollment season, which ended on Jan. 31.

Many health plans offered in the public marketplaces provide a limited choice of doctors and hospitals, and some insurers narrowed their networks this year by excluding some doctors and dropping popular teaching hospitals.

The lie will be his legacy.

Consumers have grumbled about the changes, and some say they have had difficulty finding medical specialists. But cost-conscious consumers have gravitated to these plans because they tend to offer lower premiums than health plans providing a greater choice of doctors and hospitals.

Consumers can already find out which health plans include a specific doctor. But until now they had no reliable way to determine if a health plan had a large or small network of providers. The new ratings will indicate how the breadth of a health plan’s network compares with that of other plans in the same geographic area.

“This could be really helpful for a lot of consumers,” said Sabrina Corlette, a consumer advocate and professor at the Health Policy Institute of Georgetown University.

How about patients?

Consumers have also complained about the out-of-pocket costs for many health plans under the Affordable Care Act. Consumer groups say the rate of increase is unsustainable. Moreover, they say, high out-of-pocket costs have deterred some people with insurance from using expensive prescription drugs.

Ben Wakana, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said that in setting the new ceiling on out-of-pocket costs, the administration had used a formula laid out in the Affordable Care Act.

What exactly is affordable about this thing anyway?

Before the law was adopted, he said, people with cancer or other serious illnesses could be bankrupted by hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, and the law provides new protections.

People with low incomes can obtain discounts that reduce their deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs if they choose midlevel silver plans. Slightly more than half of the people with marketplace coverage received such “cost-sharing reductions” last year.

Corlette, the Georgetown University professor, said that in writing the new rules, “the administration was walking a very delicate line, pushing forward with consumer protections while trying to keep insurers onboard and participating in the marketplaces.”

In some markets, consumers can choose from dozens of health plans. In a move intended to simplify the shopping experience, the Obama administration has devised six model health plans that it describes as standardized options....

Shopping for politicians, shopping for health care. 

Kind of tells you something about AmeriKa, doe$n't it?

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May God help you all:

"Christians flock to groups that help members pay medical bills" by Abby Goodnough New York Times  March 10, 2016

SAN ANTONIO — When Chris Doyle learned that his health insurance deductible would climb to $10,000 last year, he and his wife, both evangelical Christians, “spent a couple weeks just praying,” he said.

Then they opted out of insurance altogether, joining something called a health care sharing ministry, which requires members to help cover one another’s major medical costs as they come up.

While such nonprofit ministries have been around for decades, interest in them has grown since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, largely because the law exempts members from the requirement to have health insurance or pay a yearly fine.

Samaritan Ministries International, which Doyle and his wife, Sarah, joined last winter, plays matchmaker, assigning member families to help pay the medical bills of other members. The money is mailed directly to the families in need, often with handwritten prayers or notes of support — or in the case of one family here, strawberry stickers and a drawing of an elephant for their 5-year-old as she recovered from ear tube surgery.

Because they are not insurance companies, sharing ministries provide no guarantee that members’ medical debts will be paid; members are advised to trust that God will provide. The ministries say the payment system is helping Christians fulfill a biblical mandate to share one another’s burdens.

“Our only assets are the good will and continued participation of our members,” said James Lansberry, executive vice president of Samaritan, which is based in Peoria, Illinois.

Some ministries operate differently, requiring members to pay monthly into accounts from which funds are disbursed to those with eligible medical bills. Pre-existing medical conditions are often not covered, nor are preventive care, mental health and injuries resulting from behavior the ministry considers immoral or reckless. Members who acquire a sexually transmitted disease from an extramarital affair are out of luck, for instance, as are those injured while driving drunk or during a melee.

Still, membership in sharing ministries has more than doubled over the last six years, to 535,000 from about 200,000, according to the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries. More participants live in Texas than in any other state, according to Samaritan and the two other largest ministries, Medi-Share, based in Florida, and Christian Healthcare Ministries, based in Ohio. Under the terms of the federal health law, only members of ministries that have operated continuously since December 1999 are exempt from the requirement to have health insurance.

The growth seems to have come largely through word of mouth, at churches, schools and workplaces. Doyle, a machinist, heard about Samaritan Ministries at Grace Point Church in San Antonio, whose pastors and employees are members and whose congregants post about it on Facebook.

He and Sarah, who stays home with their two toddlers, mail a flat $405 payment to a fellow member every month, the standard rate for families of three or more. Had they stuck with the insurance he was offered through work, the Doyles said, their share of the premium would have been about $600 a month, and they would have had to pay the first $5,000 in annual medical costs outside preventive care.

Under the ministry, they also have to pay the first $300 of any medical expense they incur. They have not yet had a doctor’s bill exceed that amount, though they are waiting somewhat nervously for that day to come. Samaritan limits spending on each injury or illness to $250,000, with exceptions for people who agree to pay extra each year toward others’ bills above that amount.

“There’s a little bit of fear going into it,” said Sarah Doyle, 33, adding that she suspected she had a hernia that would need to be repaired soon. “What if people don’t pay their share and what if the money doesn’t come in? But that’s where the faith-based part comes in — I’m really going to rely on God.”

Lansberry said Samaritan members’ eligible medical bills average, cumulatively, over $16 million a month. Its membership has grown by about 50,000 over the last year, to nearly 200,000 people in 58,000 paying households.

Acknowledging that many families can qualify for subsidized insurance policies with free preventive care through the Affordable Care Act, Lansberry said most new members were not “joining primarily on price; they are joining primarily on principle.”

That is where the print ended (must be on principle these days).

Before members can be reimbursed, they sometimes must pay upfront for their medical care — potentially a sizable outlay, since hospitals increasingly require at least partial prepayment. It then takes at least two months for Samaritan to process their requests for help and for checks from other members to arrive in the mail.

The most harrowing part of health care sharing so far for Kyle Burkholder, the teaching pastor at Grace Point, and his wife, Stefani, was paying $6,500 upfront for their daughter’s ear tube surgery, they said. They waited for what seemed like forever for other members’ checks to come

No different than dealing with an insurance company.

“About 90 days after her surgery, sure enough, the money did start showing up,” Burkholder said. “And it was with handwritten notes — every day it was one, two, three notes, and she was reading them aloud, and I found myself just crying.”

Members with “special prayer needs” — conditions that are not eligible under the ministry’s rules — can also ask for financial help. Last month, for example, Samaritan’s newsletter highlighted the case of a woman with uterine cancer diagnosed before she became a member, and a teenager who tore a knee ligament in a dirt bike race.

Upon joining, members waive their right to sue, and in the case of Samaritan, appeals panels of randomly selected members are supposed to settle disputes. Lansberry said such panels had been convened only four times since Samaritan’s founding, in 1994, and that the organization had never been the subject of complaints to state attorneys general or insurance commissioners.

The insurance commissioner in Washington state did try to stop Samaritan from operating there in 2011, saying it was selling “unauthorized insurance,” but the state Legislature then passed a law explicitly exempting health care sharing ministries from regulations.

Insurance commissioners in Kentucky and Oklahoma had tried to block Medi-Share, the Florida-based ministry, but were thwarted when their Legislatures also passed protection laws.

In 2001, Ohio’s attorney general sued one ministry — known then as the Christian Brotherhood Newsletter, and now as Christian Healthcare Ministries — ultimately forcing its leaders to repay $15 million they had spent on homes, vehicles and excessive salaries out of the central fund where members had sent payments. 

Another religion-based looting scheme!

Members have filed a handful of lawsuits against Medi-Share after bills they had expected to be covered were not. The cases were settled out of court. While the health law requires the ministries to submit to annual independent audits, critics question whether that safeguard is sufficient.

“Our message has consistently been that this is not a health insurance product that we regulate, so buyer beware,” said Nick Gerhart, the insurance commissioner in Iowa. “A premature baby could cost $1 million pretty easily, so it wouldn’t take very many of those to put a significant strain on any group, let alone an unregulated group like this.” 

I've heard of million-dollar babies before.

Lee and Amy Jebson of Chesapeake, Virginia, were not expecting any major medical costs when they signed up for Medi-Share in 2014 after being priced out of the plans available through HealthCare.gov, the federally run insurance marketplace. Then their 8-year-old son was found to have acute lymphoblastic leukemia, leading to several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of medical bills in just the first few months of his treatment.

“One single fever is a $10,000-a-night hospital cost,” said Amy Jebson, adding that her family pays a $500 monthly share toward other members’ medical costs, plus $2,500 a year toward their own. But so far, she added, their bills are being covered, with the exception of a few thousand dollars.

They, like others interviewed, said joining the ministries allowed them to live by their religious beliefs rather than follow a government mandate to buy insurance that may cover things they do not want to pay for, like abortion (though half the states do not allow plans sold through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, at least, to pay for abortions) or birth control.

“It’s really a model of wanting to take care of someone else — not being told, ‘You have to,’ or ‘I’m forcing you to do this,’” Lee Jebson said.

The Doyles said their impression might change if they incur big medical bills, but for now they appreciated the personal nature of their monthly transactions.

“There’s something different about writing my check to someone who needs it,” Sarah Doyle said. “I feel like I’m loving on somebody instead of just paying my premiums.”

Or sending it off to some insurance or government bureaucrat.

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They wouldn't trade their plane for any other:

"Free trade an issue on both sides heading into Ohio" by James Pindell Globe Staff  March 10, 2016

As the campaign moves to the key Ohio primary Tuesday, Ohio, like Michigan, has seen its fair share of job losses that some attribute to free-trade policies that have encouraged outsourcing and increased imports. In 2015, Ohio lost 115,000 jobs due to free-trade deals, according to a study released this month by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on conditions of low- and middle-income workers. The study found that Michigan ranked first for the most job loss due to free trade last year, while Ohio ranked sixth.

Exit polls in Michigan showed that nearly 60 percent of Democratic voters there believed that free trade contributed to job losses. More than half of Republican voters agreed. And those who felt that way were also most likely to vote for Sanders and or Trump.

Trump, the Republican front-runner, described himself at a Tuesday night press conference as a “free-trader” — but also a “smart trader.”

“China has taken millions of jobs, thousands of factories — what they have done to us, it’s the greatest theft in the history of the world,” he said.

In Ohio, trade will likely be a major issue in both the Republican and Democratic primaries.

Ohio still views itself as an old world manufacturing outlet. Trade issues resonate here more than elsewhere. We still make stuff here,” said David Niven, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati. “This is another state that is fertile ground for Donald Trump, and that could be a problem for Clinton. You have people here who feel left out and that they have been sold out on trade.”

See: Dropping Democrat Primary Coverage

Former president Bill Clinton pushed hard for several free-trade deals in the 1990s, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, and most-favored nation trading status with China. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton said she hoped the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade proposal, backed by the Obama administration, would become the “gold standard” for all other trade deals. As Sanders rose to become a significant challenger, in the past year, however, she announced she was against the TPP deal because she wasn’t happy with the details.

The debate takes place as the economy remains the top issue for Ohioans. A CNN/ORC poll released Wednesday showed 42 percent of voters in both parties considered the economy the top issue in the campaign. In the Ohio Democratic Senate primary, too, trade has become a key issue.

That said, Ohio voters have not punished Clinton or Ohio Governor John Kasich, now a Republican candidate for president, too badly over support for free-trade policies in the past. Clinton won the Democratic primary here in 2008 over Barack Obama, focusing on white working-class voters.

But she has a problem with them now.

Kasich, who has said that anti-union legislation like Right-To-Work is not a priority of his, has won two statewide elections and holds one of the highest approval ratings of any governor in the country.

So we are told.

Still, Republican operatives on the ground in Ohio say there is tension between the grass roots and the establishment within the party, even as evidenced in hotly contested races for the state Republican Party’s central committee, where Tea Party organizers have organized several challengers.

“Republican voters in Ohio see Kasich as the embodiment of the establishment,” said Ohio Republican consultant Mark Weaver. “Even though Donald Trump has no ideological core, he says things on trade that make people believe he has a plan and he will stick up for the little guy. That has proven to be powerful.”

And yet somehow Kasich will win Ohio tonight.

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NEXT DAY UPDATES:

"The first returns from Ohio had Trump 12 points up, then suddenly it reversed and with just 8% of the state reporting, Kasich is declared the winner. I have my doubts.Ohio voters are not stupid. They know that Kasich will not be the Nominee. He is in last place. Voting for Kasich is a wasted vote." --whatreallyhappened

As suspected, it was stolen from Trump. 

That's not an endorsement of the guy; it is simply a recognition of the corrupt process called elections in AmeriKa.

"The Ohio governor is the only one of the remaining hopefuls who doesn’t have “November Disaster” emblazoned on his forehead."

So sayeth a Kasich troll.

Of course, Kasich has no business being the nominee of the Republican Party. He's skipped the South and most of his voters are crossover Democrats and independents. In fact,m he should be running in their primary. 

Should he weasel the nomination away from Trump and be awarded it by the Repuglican e$tabli$hment, they can forget about winning the White House.