Why not Kasich?

The only three options for the Republican Party at its Cleveland convention are Trump, Cruz, or chaos.

That was my argument in a recent column: Any effort on the part of the Republican establishment to bypass the popular-vote winner (Trump) or runner-up (Cruz) and instead hand the nomination to a white-horse candidate who either didn't run for president this year (Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney) or who dropped out early (Marco Rubio, Chris Christie) would spark justified outrage among rank-and-file members of the party. That's where we'd get chaos.

I stick by the prediction. But it's worth digging a little deeper to reflect on precisely why this is. Because when it comes to one person in particular the answer isn't obvious.

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That person is Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

I barely mentioned Kasich in that earlier column because no one in the party (besides, presumably, Kasich himself) seems to think he has any plausible path to the nomination. He's obviously not going to win 1,237 delegates outright. (He's currently at 149, which is 24 delegates behind Rubio, who dropped out on March 15.) Kasich is just as obviously not going to pull a Cruz and strong-arm roughly 1,000 delegates to switch over to him on a second ballot. (The better-funded and much more successful Cruz campaign is working like crazy to guarantee such a switch among just a few hundred delegates.) And unlike Trump with his alt-right populist foot soldiers, or Cruz with his backing from the party's true conservative true believers, Kasich appears not to enjoy enthusiastic support from any faction of his party outside of his home state of Ohio.

All of that is true and helps to explain why Kasich probably won't be the nominee.

What it doesn't explain is why he shouldn't be the nominee. Because the fact is that any argument in favor of Cruz getting the nod after the first ballot can be deployed in favor of Kasich prevailing instead. And since Kasich would undoubtedly be the stronger option to take on Hillary Clinton in the general election — Cruz loses to Clinton by two points in head-to-head polls, while Kasich prevails by eight points and would most likely deliver Ohio's crucial electoral votes — it's unclear why the GOP would opt to go with Cruz if Trump fails on the first ballot.

So really: Why not Kasich?

If Trump gets to 1,237 delegates by the end of the primaries on June 7, he'll prevail on the first ballot at the convention and win the nomination. But if he falls even one delegate short, the Cruz partisans maintain, he should be denied it. Why? Because those are the rules, and because he'll have a mere plurality of the popular vote — probably just under 40 percent — which means, in effect, that a majority of the party is anti-Trump.

That's when the Case for Cruz really kicks in.

The first thing to notice about that case is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with democratic legitimacy. Cruz's claim to the nomination because he has won nine out of 35 GOP contests so far holds no more water than Kasich claiming the same of his single victory. If Trump should be denied the nomination because 60 percent of the party voted for some not-Trump alternative, then surely Cruz should be denied the nomination when more like 70 percent of the party will have voted for some not-Cruz alternative.

Once the party decides to deny the nomination to the candidate who won a plurality of the popular vote, democracy ceases to be a relevant criterion for decision.

So why should Cruz prevail? To judge by how things have been unfolding in recent weeks, the answer is apparently that his campaign should be rewarded for mastering the labyrinthine rules that determine how delegates are chosen in states across the country. If Cruz and his surrogates can ensure that his supporters get named as delegates, and if his campaign can dragoon a couple hundred uncommitted delegates into falling in line at the convention, then he will have a good chance of crossing the 1,237 threshold on the second ballot or a subsequent one.

But does that make any political or moral sense? Why should the Republican Party pick as its standard bearer the best rule-follower of them all when he also happens to be an extremist who's widely disliked in the party and holds little potential for more mainstream appeal? Isn't that kind of arbitrary and even nonsensical? Wouldn't it make more sense to use a different criterion?

I suspect it's something like this line of reasoning that's kept Kasich in the race for so long. He's won only his home state and looks unlikely to win any others. He's insurmountably behind in the delegate count. He still trails Rubio in the popular vote five weeks after the latter suspended his campaign. Yet he keeps plugging along, hoping against hope that if Trump fails to secure the nomination after the first ballot in Cleveland, the delegates will look at the three men still standing and decide to vote for the best general election candidate instead of the best rule follower.

Would Trump's and Cruz's die-hard anti-establishment supporters be thrilled with Kasich as the nominee? Not at all. But I bet they'd be more content with him than they would be with Rubio or Ryan — both of whom are establishment darlings. Kasich may not rail against the leadership of the party, but that leadership has shown no warmth or enthusiasm for him at all. That makes Kasich an ideal choice to lead the party in this strangest of political years, when populist furies have upended everyone's expectations.

Why not Kasich? I can't think of a single reason.