Ohio Sen. Rob Portman was there for Ohio Gov. John Kasich through his doomed Republican presidential primary campaign, and Kasich will be there for Portman in his tough re-election campaign.
Kasich has already done eight fundraising emails for Portman, plus a direct-mail piece soliciting campaign money. Those missives — there are more to come, said Portman campaign sources — have yielded nearly $100,000. [...] Yet perhaps the most important role for Kasich will be campaign appearances. Portman is planning an RV tour of the state in August, with Kasich joining him. More joint events will happen this fall, the sources said.
Polls show Portman and former Gov. Ted Strickland in a tight race. Kasich is popular in the state, so Portman is hoping to get a Kasich boost to offset the drag that is Donald Trump at the top of the ticket.
The thing about Kasich is that while he may be popular in Ohio, one area where he doesn’t exactly reverse Trump’s weaknesses is in how he talks about women. It’s not just that Kasich is horrible on women's health issues—though he is. It’s that he’s prone to saying things like women should work online rather than getting paid maternity leave, as if it’s a breeze to care for an infant while holding down a job—are women supposed to be typing away with one hand while changing diapers with the other? Or there’s the time he suggested that the gender pay gap is because women can't compete. Sure, he walked it back a little when challenged, but since it turns out that women in his office earn $10 an hour less than men, that wasn’t the most convincing walk-back of all time. This is also a guy whose take on sexual assault was that women shouldn’t go to parties where there’s alcohol, and whose charming way of calling on a young woman seeking to ask a question about undocumented immigrants was to say “I’m sorry, I don’t have any Taylor Swift concert tickets.”