As he prepares to enter the 2016 presidential race on July 21, Ohio Gov. John Kasich is dusting off the playbook of failed 2012 presidential contender Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor who tried to secure the GOP nomination by badmouthing his own party’s voters. Like Huntsman, Kasich is setting himself up to win the media and lose the primary.

Liberal commentator Ed Kilgore recently argued that, despite a gigantic GOP field with more than a dozen credible candidates, the contenders are all essentially trying to get to the right of one another. “You’d have to say that the shadow of Huntsman ‘12 is pretty big; nobody wants to go there at all, even if the minority of self-identified GOP moderates—and there are even some who self-identify as liberals—is a tempting target for someone trying to get into the mid-single-digits in polls.”