Donald Trump "taps in to the frustration that Americans have," his fellow GOP presidential candidate John Kasich said Wednesday, but voters don't always want their lives and futures to look bleak.
"People don't want to stay in the negative," the Ohio governor told
Fox News' "America's Newsroom" host Bill Hemmer. "They want to move to the positive. They want to believe the sun comes up."
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That message of optimism is what he tries to spread "when I'm traveling across the country or back to my beloved Ohio," Kasich said, but he does understand the nation's frustration, as he "comes from a place where people have a lot of frustration from the time when they were a kid."
"Little banks are being gobbled up," said Kasich. "Nobody in Washington seems to be able to do anything to make sure they are an integral part of our community. There are people who lose their jobs at age of 51 and don't know what's going to happen. Their kids have high student loans and they can't get a job.
"They say the government is working against me in many cases. That's what many of them say."
Kasich's ratings in the polls have been climbing since last week's GOP debate, including coming in
third place in a new poll in New Hampshire, just behind Trump and Jeb Bush, and he thinks it's because he's been spending a lot of time on the ground.
"You come up here and you do these town hall meetings," said Kasich. "I have done about a dozen of them. You stand there for an hour and introduce yourself. Then you take 45 minutes' worth of questions, and people poke you and they look at you and they try to figure out whether they like you. And so that's a big deal; that's a big difference."
He said he's also had some television ads that helped give him name identification, but still, he thinks his climb has come more from "just being in the trenches."
He pointed out that former New Hampshire Sen. John Sununu is managing his campaign in the state. In addition,
CNN reported Wednesday that GOP operative Tom Rath has signed on as senior national adviser and co-chair for Kasich's push in that early voting state.
Rath, a former New Hampshire GOP committeeman and state attorney general, backed Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012 and served as national adviser to President George W. Bush's presidential campaign.
Kasich, though, said he was taking a wait-and-see approach on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton's decision to turn over her private email server to investigators, including if he thought she committed a crime.
"I don't understand why she had this thing, what she was trying to do. She said she wasn't going to turn it over, now she is. We'll have to see what the results are," he said.
"I think it's a serious situation, obviously, but I want to see what develops ... there is no way I would make an opinion on this at this point."