Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) doesn’t want voters in Michigan to think former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney prefers another candidate—despite the fact that Romney, a Michigan native, recorded robocalls for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), too.
“Gov. Romney’s kinda recording robocalls for everyone. And I didn’t want people to think he favors one person over me because he doesn’t,” Kasich told reporters Tuesday after a rally in Lansing, Michigan. “So you know, it’s his words, I don’t write his scripts.”
It was widely reported that Romney recorded robocalls for Rubio’s campaign in four states, but the fact that Romney also recorded a robocall for Kasich in Michigan went largely unnoticed until Tuesday afternoon. (Kasich’s campaign didn’t respond to an inquiry from the New York Times on Monday.)
The scripts Romney reads in the robocalls for the two candidates are nearly identical. Kasich’s robocall begins, “Hello, this is Mitt Romney calling and I’m calling on behalf of Kasich for America.”
Because Romney is recording robocalls for multiple candidates, Kasich said the show of support didn’t come under ideal circumstances.
“We want to make sure people don’t think that Romney is for someone else and not for me, particularly in the state of Michigan,” he told reporters. “So is this the scenario I would like to have had it work out like this? Not really, but it is what it is.”
Listen to Romney robocall for Kasich below, via ABC News:
