“I’m sure that he is, and I don’t really care,” Mr. Kasich said Tuesday when asked if Mr. Cruz is a “natural born citizen” of the United States.

“We [have] so many problems — we got people whose wages have been frozen, you got income inequality, you got people who live in the shadows with mental illness or drug addiction who’ve been left behind,” Mr. Kasich said on CNN’s “New Day.”

“We got to help our minority community to rise, and I don’t spend my time talking about whether somebody’s … qualified to be president or not,” he said. “I got too many other things to talk about. And so I’m really not interested. I’ve got too much I want to say positively to get America moving again to spend my time talking about where the heck Ted Cruz was born. I’m not interested.”