Outgoing Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) warned in a USA Today op-ed on Monday that the GOP “seems stuck in the 1950s.”
Kasich, who is considering running for president in 2020 after a failed bid in 2016, also said Republicans haven’t learned from their losses in the midterm elections.
{mosads}”So much about American life and our political leadership — notably in my own Republican Party — seems stuck in the 1950s. While nearly every aspect of the world around us has been changing … those who fancy themselves as leaders are plodding far behind the march of time,” Kasich wrote.
Kasich added that Republicans are “threatened by the new diversity of voices that have joined the public chorus, by the long-ignored problems that a new generation wants to solve, by an unsettled world that no longer follows America’s lead.”
“But they’ve learned absolutely nothing from their skunking in the midterm elections,” he continued. “They didn’t watch, or chose to ignore, the new Congress being sworn in the other day. It was a more energetic, diverse and self-assured group than those chambers have seen before.”
The op-ed was published on the same day that Kasich will leave office and Gov.-elect Mike DeWine (R) will replace him.
Kasich, a critic of President Trump, has said he is “very seriously” considering running for president in 2020 but has yet to say officially whether he will run.
He wrote that no politicians will survive by “practicing politics the way Sears or RadioShack practiced retail” in the era of companies like Amazon and Uber.
“For Republicans, this means breaking their own self-made mold of being naysayers instead of doers,” Kasich continued. “It means designing market-driven, center-right solutions that actually solve problems while revealing their compassion.”
His criticism of the party comes after he said in 2016 that the GOP “cannot be stuck in the 1980s.”