Kasich: Ohio special election was ‘basically a vote on what people thought about Trump’

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) said Wednesday that he believes the results of Tuesday night’s hotly contested special election in a solidly Republican district reflects how voters feel about President Trump.

Kasich reflected on the results from Ohio’s 12th District, where Republican Troy Balderson holds a razor-thin lead over Democrat Danny O’Connor for a seat that the GOP has won easily for more than three decades.  

“Neither of them really emerged great, and I think it was basically a vote on what people thought about Trump,” Kasich said.

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Kasich, who ran against Trump in the 2016 GOP presidential primary and has since been a regular critic of the president’s rhetoric, noted that a Republican candidate would typically get about 70 percent of the vote in Delaware County in the district, but Tuesday’s race was closer to a 50-50 split.

“I cannot describe to you how amazing it was that the race was close,” said Kasich, who represented the district from 1983-2001.

“It’s because a lot of Republican women they don’t like this noise. They don’t like this division,” Kasich added.

Trump and other Republicans declared victory in the Ohio race late Tuesday night, even as the two candidates remained separated by less than a percentage point.

At least 3,367 provisional ballots were yet to be counted, making the final outcome unknown.

Trump credited the victory to his appearance at a rally last weekend in support of Balderson, and predicted larger Republican victories in November.

Kasich on Wednesday downplayed the significance of Trump’s rally, instead arguing national media attention likely played more of a role in boosting turnout.

He further suggested the results could portend future elections where districts are less reliably partisan.

“We may in the beginning of entering, in some ways, a post-partisan environment where people are going to stop listening so much to the party and start taking the measure of what they’re seeing,” Kasich said.

In a separate interview with CBS News, Kasich reasoned that Tuesday night’s results were a message from voters to Republicans to “knock it off.”

“Stop the chaos, the division, no more of this family separation that we see at the border or taking people’s health care away,” he said. “I think people basically have had enough and they’re sending a message to the Republicans, including the Republican in the White House.”

–Updated at 7:24 p.m.