I’ve got a quick look back at the Walker campaign at Bloomberg. In that article I don’t bring up Tim Pawlenty’s 2011 campaign for president. But everyone else is mentioning it, and they’re mentioning it for good reasons. Both of them were Midwestern governors who were dismissed as boring, and tried to make up for that reputation in unconvincing ways. (Pawlenty, in possibly the low point of his campaign, promised to “take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government.”) Both of them were supposedly going to do well in Iowa because they were from neighboring states but ended up having to drop out five months before the caucuses.
But I think personality was the least of the problems for both of these candidates. If you think of the GOP as split between the establishment, anti-establishment conservatives, and Republican regulars in the middle, both Pawlenty and Walker were trying to appeal to that middle group while picking up some support from each of the ends. On paper that ought to be possible, but it never seems to work. The establishment-oriented voters want a very familiar face, not a new one. The anti-establishment voters want somebody angrier or purer than a governor can be. The middle-of-the-road voters aren’t paying a lot of attention half a year out. And the candidate who seems like he could unify the party ends up having to leave early.
John Kasich, by contrast, has an underrated advantage in this race: He has a strategy that is easier to execute than anyone else’s. He can go after a discrete and large constituency within the party (Republicans who consider themselves moderate or liberal), he can go after it single-mindedly, and none of the other candidates is going to do it.