Background and career
John Richard Kasich Jr. ( KAY-sik; born May 13, 1952) is an American politician and author who was the 69th governor of Ohio from 2011 to 2019. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1983 to 2001, and was a candidate for the presidential nomination in 2000 and 2016. Kasich was born and raised in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. He moved to Ohio in 1970 to attend Ohio State University and graduated with a bachelor's degree. After a single term in the Ohio Senate, he served nine terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio's 12th congressional district. His tenure included 18 years on the House Armed Services Committee and six years as chair of the House Budget Committee. Kasich was a key figure in the passage of both 1996 welfare reform legislation and the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Kasich decided not to run for re-election in 2000 and ran for president instead, but withdrew from the race before the Republican primaries. After leaving Congress, Kasich hosted Heartland with John Kasich on Fox News from 2001 to 2007 and served as managing director of the Lehman Brothers office in Columbus, Ohio. He ran for governor of Ohio in 2010, defeating Democratic incumbent Ted Strickland. He was re-elected in 2014, defeating Democratic challenger Ed FitzGerald by 30 percentage points. Term-limited, he was succeeded by fellow Republican Mike DeWine. Kasich ran for president again in 2016, finishing in fourth place in the Republican primaries behind Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, and winning the primary in Ohio. Kasich declined to support Trump as the Republican presidential nominee and did not attend the 2016 Republican National Convention. From 2019 to 2023, Kasich was a CNN contributor, and since then has been an analyst on NBC News. Kasich is known as one of Trump's most prominent critics within the Republican Party, and endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for president in a speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
John Richard Kasich Jr. was born and raised in the Pittsburgh suburb of McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. His parents were Anne (née Vukovich; 1918–1987) and John Richard Kasich (1919–1987), who worked as a mail carrier. Kasich's father was of Czech descent, while his mother was of Croatian descent. Both parents were children of immigrants and were practicing Roman Catholics. He has described himself as "a Croatian and a Czech". His paternal grandparents were Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants from the Ung County of Czechoslovakia at the time. After attending public schools in his hometown of McKees Rocks, Kasich moved to Columbus, Ohio, in 1970 to attend Ohio State University, where he joined the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity. As a freshman, he wrote a letter to President Richard Nixon describing concerns he had about the nation and requesting a meeting with the President. The letter was delivered to Nixon by the university's president Novice Fawcett and Kasich was granted a 20-minute meeting with Nixon in December 1970. Earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Ohio State in 1974, he went on to work as a researcher for the Ohio Legislative Service Commission. From 1975 to 1978, he served as an administrative assistant to then-state Senator Buz Lukens. In 1978, Kasich ran against Democratic incumbent Robert O'Shaughnessy for Ohio Senate. A political ally of Kasich remembers him during that time as a persistent campaigner: "People said, 'If you just quit calling me, I'll support you.'" At age 26, Kasich won with 56% of the vote, beginning his four-year term representing the 15th district. Kasich was the second youngest person ever elected to the Ohio Senate. One of his first acts as a state senator was to refuse a pay raise. Republicans gained control of the State Senate in 1980, but Kasich went his own way, for example, by opposing a budget proposal he believed would raise taxes and writing his own proposal instead.
In 1982, Kasich ran for Congress in Ohio's 12th congressional district, which included portions of Columbus as well as the cities of Westerville, Reynoldsburg, Worthington, and Dublin. He won the Republican primary with 83% of the vote and defeated incumbent Democratic U.S. Congressman Bob Shamansky in the general election by a margin of 50%–47%. He would never face another contest nearly that close, and was re-elected eight more times with at least 64 percent of the vote. During his congressional career, Kasich was considered a fiscal conservative, taking aim at programs supported by Republicans and Democrats. He worked with Ralph Nader in seeking to reduce corporate tax loopholes. Kasich was a member of the House Armed Services Committee for 18 years. He developed a "fairly hawkish" reputation on that committee, although he "also zealously challenged" defense spending he considered wasteful. Among the Pentagon projects that he targeted were the B-2 bomber program (teaming up with Democratic representative Ron Dellums to cut the program, their efforts were partly successful) and the A-12 bomber program (ultimately canceled by defense secretary Dick Cheney in 1991). He participated extensively in the passage of the Goldwater–Nichols Act of 1986, which reorganized the U.S. Department of Defense. He also pushed through the bill creating the 1988 Base Realignment and Closure Commission, which closed obsolete U.S. military bases, and successfully opposed a proposed $110 million expansion of the Pentagon building after the end of the Cold War. He also "proposed a national commission on arms control" and "urged tighter controls over substances that could be used for biological warfare." Kasich said he was "100 percent for" the first Persian Gulf War as well as the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, but said that he did not favor U.S. military participation in the Lebanese Civil War or in Bosnia. In 1997, with fellow Republican representative Floyd Spence, he introduced legislation (supported by some congressional Democrats) for the U.S. to pull out of a multilateral peacekeeping force in Bosnia. In the House, he supported the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, a U.S. Representative Ron Dellums (D- CA)-led initiative to impose economic sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa.
In 1993, Kasich became the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee. Kasich and other House Budget Committee Republicans proposed an alternative to President Bill Clinton's deficit reduction bill, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. That proposal included funds to implement Republican proposals for health care, welfare, and crime control legislation and for a child tax credit. The Penny-Kasich Plan, named after Kasich and fellow lead sponsor Tim Penny, was supported by Republicans and conservative Democrats. It proposed $90 billion in spending cuts over five years, almost three times as much in cuts as the $37 billion in cuts backed by the Clinton administration and Democratic congressional leaders. About one-third ($27 billion) of the proposed Penny-Kasich cuts would come from means-testing Medicare, specifically by reducing Medicare payments to seniors who earned $75,000 or more in adjusted gross income. This angered the AARP, which lobbied against the legislation. Another $26 billion of the Penny-Kasich plan's cuts would have come from the U.S. Department of Defense and foreign aid, which led Secretary of Defense Les Aspin to say that the plan would destroy military morale. Another $27 billion in savings would have come from federal layoffs. The proposal was narrowly defeated in the House by a 219–213 vote. As ranking member of the Budget Committee, Kasich proposed his own health care reform plan as a rival to the Clinton health care plan of 1993 championed by First Lady Hillary Clinton, but more market-based. As journalist Zeke Miller wrote in Time magazine, "The Kasich plan would have covered all Americans by 2005, using a form of an individual mandate that would have required employees to purchase insurance through their employers. (The mandate was an idea initially supported by conservative groups like The Heritage Foundation.)" On November 17, 1993, Kasich voted to approve the North American Free Trade Agreement, casting a "yea" vote for the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act. In 1994, Kasich was one of the Republican leaders to support a last-minute deal with President Bill Clinton to pass the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. After a series of meetings with Clinton's Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta, a longtime friend of Kasich, the assault weapons ban was passed when 42 Republicans crossed party lines and voted to ban assault weapons with the Democrats. His support of the assault-weapons ban resulted in the NRA Political Victory Fund giving Kasich an "F" rating in 1994.
Kasich became chair of the House Budget Committee in 1995, following the Republican Revolution in the 1994 United States House of Representatives elections. In 1996, he introduced the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in the House, an important welfare reform bill signed into law by President Clinton. During the 1996 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Bob Dole was reported to have considered Kasich as a vice presidential running mate but instead selected Jack Kemp, a former congressman and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. In 1997, Kasich rose to national prominence after becoming "the chief architect of a deal that balanced the federal budget for the first time since 1969"—the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. In 1998, Kasich voted to impeach President Clinton on all four charges made against him. In 1999, while the Senate prepared to vote on the charges, he said: "I believe these are impeachable and removable offenses." Kasich did not seek re-election in 2000.
After leaving Congress, Kasich went to work for Fox News, hosting Heartland with John Kasich on the Fox News Channel and guest-hosting The O'Reilly Factor, filling in for Bill O'Reilly as needed. He also occasionally appeared as a guest on Hannity & Colmes. Kasich served on the board of directors for several corporations, including Invacare Corporation and the Chicago-based Norvax Inc. In 2001, Kasich joined Lehman Brothers' investment banking division as a managing director, in Columbus, Ohio. He remained at Lehman Brothers until it declared bankruptcy in 2008. That year, Lehman Brothers paid him a $182,692 salary and a $432,200 bonus. He stated that the bonus was for work performed in 2007. Kasich's employment by Lehman Brothers was criticized during his subsequent campaigns in light of the firm's collapse during the 2008 financial crisis. Kasich responded to critics by saying: "I wasn't involved in the inner workings of Lehman, I was a banker. I didn't go to board meetings or go and talk investment strategy with the top people. I was nowhere near that. That's like, it's sort of like being a car dealer in Zanesville and being blamed for the collapse of GM." Republicans made efforts to recruit Kasich to run for Ohio governor in 2006, but he declined to enter the race. In 2008, Kasich formed Recharge Ohio, a political action committee (PAC) with the goal of raising money to help Republican candidates for the Ohio House of Representatives and Ohio Senate, in an effort to retain Republican majorities in the Ohio General Assembly. Kasich served as honorary chairman of the PAC.
