Kasich Lauds Women 'Who Left Their Kitchens' to Help First Campaign

The Kasich campaign says the Ohio governor wasn’t being a misogynist when he lauded women who came out of the kitchen to help his political career.

Kasich, who jumped into politics as a member of the Ohio Senate in 1979, was talking to a crowd in Virginia about how he got elected to the legislature.

“I didn’t have anybody for me. We just got an army of people, who — and many women who left their kitchens to go out and to go door to door to put up yard signs for me,” Kasich said.

“All the way back, when, you know, things were different. Now you call homes and everybody’s out working. But at that time, early days, it was an army of the women that really helped me get elected to the state Senate.”

A nursing student at George Mason University stood up minutes later and told the governor, “Your comment earlier about the women coming out of the kitchen to support you – I’ll come support you but I wont be coming out of the kitchen.”

“I gotcha, I gotcha,” he responded, as reported by NBC.

Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols said in a statement that “to try and twist his comments into anything else is just desperate politics.”

“John Kasich’s campaigns have always been homegrown affairs. They’ve literally been run out of his friends’ kitchens and many of his early campaign teams were made up of stay-at-home moms who believed deeply in the changes he wanted to bring to them and their families,” Nichols said. “That’s real grassroots campaigning and he’s proud of that authentic support.”

Kasich laughed today when asked by reporters if he should drop out to help coalesce support behind an anti-Trump. “It’s ridiculous,” he said.

The governor is campaigning in Georgia on Tuesday and in Mississippi and Louisiana on Wednesday.

The campaign today announced an endorsement from former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.

“I’ve known him for more than 30 years, since we came to Congress together, and I’ve always respected the way he successfully unites people of different views to enact conservative policies. He did it in Ohio and helped turn around his state and he did it as chief architect of the balanced budget in Washington–something we haven’t seen since he left,” Ridge said. “John Kasich also has both the strong command of national security and foreign policy issues that a president needs as well as the executive experience it takes to actually be Commander-in-Chief. He is ready to be president on Day One.”