And then there was One:John Kasich suspends presidential campaign: Reports

John Kasich suspends presidential campaign: Reports

Republican presidential candidate John Kasich has ended his bid for the White House, several media outlets confirmed on Wednesday.

His pulling out of the race effectively allows longtime frontrunner Donald Trump to become the likely nominee for the GOP.

Kasich abruptly canceled a planned press conference in Virginia Wednesday morning, sparking speculation that he was calling it quits.

NBC News, CNN and the Associated Press reported on Wednesday that Kasich campaign sources revealed that the Ohio governor would suspend his campaign.

Tuesday evening, the Kasich campaign appeared to be moving forward. After a disappointing finish in the Indiana primary, the Kasich campaign released a memo saying that the night’s results would not change his plans to keep pushing forward.

“Our strategy has been and continues to be one that involves winning the nomination at an open convention,” the memo reads in part.

This apparent commitment to stay in the race seemed reinforced by a Twitter post parodying the “Star Wars” opening crawl. It argued that he would have a better chance than Trump of beating likely Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the general election.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus appeared to accept Trump as the inevitable face of the GOP race in a tweet Tuesday night after the real estate magnate’s win in Indiana.

Calling Trump the “presumptive nominee,” Priebus tweeted, “We all need to unite and focus on defeating Hillary Clinton.”

In an interview Wednesday with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, Priebus returned to the unity message.

“We’ve got a candidate that is winning in every single state. I mean, a week earlier, I don’t think he had lost a county in six states,” he said of Trump. “So I mean, look, it’s time to unite.”

But he stopped short of saying Kasich should drop out when Camerota asked if that would help unify the party.

“You know, obviously, that’s up to John Kasich,” he said. “He’s got his own — his own platform and his own agenda that he’s running, and I’m going to leave that up to him.”

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz suspended his campaign Tuesday night after the Indiana primary results rolled in. Early on, Cruz resisted publicly attacking Trump in the hope that his supporters would join him after the Trump media frenzy waned. But, as Trump continued to dominate the primaries and as the field of candidates thinned, Cruz went after the frontrunner, receiving the nickname “Lyin’ Ted” from the master-brander in the process.

Kasich had been a long-shot candidate ever since the first Republican presidential debates last summer. The stage was already overcrowded with establishment favorites and political outsiders. As the election dragged on, it became clear that his campaign had more or less turned into a spoiler aimed at preventing Trump from getting the requisite 1,237 delegates to clinch the party’s nod without a contested convention.

He was scheduled to speak in Virginia at 10:45 a.m. on Wednesday but never appeared. His run for the Oval Office will come to a close with only one state primary win: his home state of Ohio.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/john-kasich-suspends-presidential-campaign-161615255.html