John Kasich, you like to couch policy in spiritual-level terms; it's about time for you to sequester yourself and have a profound one-on-one with your creator

I have no use for John Kasich. He is afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome as badly as McCain, Graham, Boehner, Snowe and Flake. Yes he has decent-human-being bona fides but he is so wrong in most everything on the policy level that that comes first in my considerations  Expanding Medicaid and justifying it with the "I-think-when-I-get-to-the-heavenly-gates-I-think-they'll-be-less-interested-in-what-I-did-to-shrink-government-than-what-I-did-to-help-the-poor" line, asserting that there is something to the utter fiction of human-caused climate change, the whole "it's -time-to-move-on-regarding-freedom-of-religion" stance, and saying that illegal aliens ought to get to just stay and eventually be granted citizenship. 

But now the poisonous nature of his presence on the post-American politics stage is having huge historical consequences that will very soon be irreversible:

 RCP’s Sean Trende ran some numbers to try to gauge just how badly Kasich’s continued presence in the race will hurt Cruz. Answer: Badly.

I ran two different scenarios in our delegate calculator. I won’t give you the specifics, but the general idea is this: I generally gave Trump 40 percent of the vote, to Cruz’s 35 percent and Kasich’s 25 percent. In New England, I gave Trump 60 percent of the vote to Kasich’s 25 percent and Cruz’s 15. In West Virginia, I gave Trump 60 percent, Cruz 25 percent and Kasich 15 percent. I also skipped Colorado, North Dakota, and American Samoa, since their delegations are unbound…

I then re-ran the scenario without Kasich, allocating 70 percent of his vote to Cruz and 30 percent to Trump…

The outcome is fairly stark. Under the first scenario, Trump wins 1,296 delegates and clinches the nomination on the last day of primary voting.

Under the second, Kasich-less scenario, however, Trump has 1,125 delegates, while Cruz collects 899. Given that under the second scenario, Cruz rattles off a string of wins at the end, and given the fact that Rubio’s and Kasich’s 300 delegates would probably disproportionately gravitate toward Cruz, this would likely be enough deny Trump the nomination.

Kasich staying in, if Trende’s guesstimates are right, is likely the difference between Trump as nominee and Cruz as nominee. It’s a 170-delegate difference to Trump’s totals alone. And to think, like most of the other anti-Trumpers out there, I was dumb enough to celebrate on Tuesday night when Kasich won Ohio, denying Trump a 66-delegate windfall even though it guaranteed that he’d stay in the race and continue to do terrible damage. That’s the sort of strategic shortsightedness that’s crippled Trump’s opponents for the past nine months. In a way, we deserve him.

Governor Kasich, why are you doing this?