Republican John Kasich enters the Concord High School in New Hampshire to the White Stripes anthem Seven Nation Army, clapping along to the beat, quickly encouraging the crowd to join in.
Kasich (63), a second-term governor of Ohio, a crucial swing state in presidential elections, is oozing a quiet confidence in a very noisy race for the Republican nomination.
Backed with important endorsements from the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Concord Monitor, a respected local New Hampshire paper, Kasich is polling with Florida senator Marco Rubio, conservative Texas senator Ted Cruz and former Florida governor Jeb Bush in a second-tier statistical dead heat in the 10 to 14 per cent bracket.
They trail billionaire Donald Trump by about 17 points.
In a vicious primary where most candidates have gone dark, Kasich has chosen light. Preferring the “sunny side of the street”, as he has called it, he has avoided the negative “woe is us – the old Eeyore effect”.
Kasich’s message is that he is the most sincere Republican contender, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get candidate. He is a doer, not a dismisser.
One audience member described Kasich in a preamble to a question as the “only optimist and pragmatist” left in the Republican primary.
He pitches himself as a candidate who has been able to work with Democrats and with a record to prove that, having balanced budgets at a state level in Ohio and a national level while serving in the House of Representatives from 1983 to 2001.
This plays well in New Hampshire, where Republicans are more fiscally than socially conservative.
He speaks about “the power of convening” and persuasion, which appeals to people here alienated by the “extremism” of Trump or Cruz.
“You don’t jam things through,” he tells the crowd in Concord.
“I fight like crazy but jamming doesn’t work. You have to be able to recruit people on the basis of the strength of your ideas.”
Winning friends
Amid the bluster and anger of the Trump and Cruz candidacies, Kasich’s strategy is winning friends in New England and could make this man of light the dark horse in New Hampshire, where today voters will choose nominees in the second state to vote in the presidential race.
He may benefit from the state’s electoral make-up where independents, estimated to make up 40 per cent of voters, can choose which party ballot they want to vote in.
The polarising effect of Trump and Cruz may encourage independents to ignore the Democratic race, where almost-local boy Bernie Sanders has a commanding lead over Hillary Clinton, to put their votes to greater use in the Republican race.
This is what BJ Bockenhauser (61), a nurse from Concord, and her husband are considering as they wait for Kasich’s 102nd town hall meeting in the state to start.
“The Republican platform has turned into a joke. He is hanging on to the remnants of the only healthy part of Republicanism at this point,” said Bockenhauser, a swing voter.
“He is campaigning responsibly. I think he is not trying to bullshit us with ‘oh my God, the sky is falling’. He is treating us like adults.”
A Republican-leaning independent, Tracy Richmond (46) from Bedford, hopes Kasich, the fifth candidate she has seen speak, will be the one not just because of how much campaigning he has done here.
“A lot of us are realising that all the other people out there are so scary that we need a sane voice,” she says.
Kasich’s stump speech evokes an era of constructive bipartisanship in Washington when Democrats and Republicans met in the middle to agree budgets in the 1980s and 1990s.
His opening anecdote about swimming against a strong Republican tide in 1993 to start talks on a budget goes down well here, showing his willingness not to crumble under fears of not being re-elected for taking on risky votes.
“Republicans are very comfortable about being against things. They are not that fired up for being for things,” he says, in a line that could as easily have come from Hillary Clinton.
Moderate voice
He is a more moderate voice on immigration on the Republican side, saying that the 11.5 million illegal immigrants should pay a fine and maybe back taxes, should be legalised but never made citizens, he says.
With 48 hours to go to a make-or-break primary for a candidate who has bet everything on New Hampshire, Kasich dares others to rise above back-biting in last-minute campaigning in the state.
“Why doesn’t everybody take down their negative ads and let’s just tell people what we are for the last 24 hours?” he asks.
Standing on the edge of a huddle of supporters at the end of the rally, Richmond is trying to get a selfie with a smiley Kasich.
His town hall has convinced her; she is going to vote for him.
“He’s honest and just down-to-earth and positive,” she says, as U2’s uplifting Beautiful Day pipes out over the speakers.
