Vivek Ramaswamy wants to carry Ohio, but on Saturday he struggled to carry one young Ohioan.
At Donald Trump’s rally in Vandalia, the Republican nominee for governor invited a 10-year-old boy onstage and attempted to lift him to the microphone. The boy lurched backward, and Ramaswamy scrambled to keep him from falling. “Whoa!” he said. “Big guy!” To be fair, the kid was a bit of a chonker, but the problem wasn’t that Ramaswamy had failed a strongman contest. It was that he should have been smart enough to stick to the traditional baby-kissing photo-op. Instead, he managed to turn another opportunity to look like a normal human being into a viral demonstration of the opposite.
Consider the video in which Ramaswamy shows off his baseball skills, or lack thereof. Last month, his campaign released a quick hit in which he recited his “10 Things I’ll Do for Ohio” agenda, filmed partly inside a batting cage. This was presumably meant to communicate several things at once: youth, vigor, and quintessential Ohio regular dudes-being-dudes stuff. But instead, viewers became fascinated by Ramaswamy’s swing, which, if I’m being generous, looked like a 6-year-old waving around a foam pool noodle. According to an eyewitness, Ramaswamy made contact on a mere five of 25 pitches in the slow-pitch cage, and the finished video simply replayed the “best” swings. The clip was mocked into oblivion within hours and quickly deleted from Instagram, though it lingered on TikTok, where the top comment asked the essential question: “Why would u post that swing?”
It’s hard to imagine a more perfect political own-goal. Ramaswamy is actually athletic (he was a nationally ranked junior tennis player), but tennis presents an obvious problem: it’s the sport of country clubs and Wimbledon (which Ramaswamy also attended last year). Baseball, by contrast, is Americana. So we got the spectacle of the rail-thin Ramaswamy playing badly at the sport focus groups presumably recommended. Maybe he should have stuck to eating stadium hot dogs instead?
Then there was the clown in the three-piece suit who had a serious question for Ramaswamy about health care policy. Or rather, the mime asked a serious question, and the clown translated it. That was the surreal scene at a Turning Point USA event this spring at Ohio State University, where the Republican nominee for governor found himself fielding a question from a silent man in white face paint assisted by a red-nosed interpreter. The clown introduced himself as a “red-blooded American clown,” apparently to distinguish himself from the more Left-wing faction of Big Clown, and assured Ramaswamy he hadn’t been infected by the “woke mind virus.” It felt like a hilarious Nathan Fielder bit, yet the fact that this anecdote has barely registered nationally says something about Ramaswamy’s feckless Ohio gubernatorial bid — the whole thing feels like a clown show.
The trouble follows him even into rooms that ought to be friendly. At the Young Americans for Liberty convention at Xavier University in Cincinnati in July, Ramaswamy was heckled from the moment he walked on stage, pressed on Israel among other issues, and he left after several minutes of a scheduled 30-minute speech. The trouble peaked when, speaking to a room full of young people, he said people of his generation had “already made it” and would be fine, while their generation would “pay the price.” To an audience of college-age libertarians already primed to revolt, it sounded like a billionaire shrugging at their future. “You’re a political cretin, and you need to get the fuck out of here,” one audience member reportedly yelled at Ramaswamy. The candidate then told the room that the real divide was between “winners and whiners” (and a crowd that didn’t see itself as whiners, therefore whined), prompting a columnist for The Columbus Dispatch to say the speech belongs to “the hall of fame of embarrassing political performances.”
Ramaswamy keeps tripping over the same rake because he is attempting something more difficult than winning an election — he’s trying to change genres mid-career. His 2024 model was a different product: fast, combative, and hyperverbal — tailor-made for the internet. Put him in a television studio like fellow talk-a-mile-a-minute conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, and he would redirect hostile questions, deliver six provocations in 90 seconds or fewer, and walk out with enough clips to feed Twitter for a week.
Running for governor requires a different breed of creature. You can’t govern the Buckeye State entirely from the replies to an Elon Musk post on X. (On a similar note, Musk’s 2024 barnstorming campaign on behalf of President Trump drew yawns until he pulled out his giant pocketbook.) Here’s the thing: state politics remains stubbornly physical. It requires church basements, county fairs, football games, college auditoriums, and prolonged conversations with men who would like to explain exactly what happened to the bridge on Route 7. Hence, the Harvard- and Yale-educated biotech multimillionaire turned national MAGA celebrity seems stuck in what might be described as an elaborate Normal Ohio Guy Simulator, and keeps failing all the side quests.
Did you hear the one about how he told Ohio reporters that he loves long drives? His campaign finance reports told a different story. The data shows that he has spent nearly $690,000 leasing aircraft since launching his campaign, including nearly $560,000 paid to a company whose listed address is a house he owns. Federal flight records reviewed by the Ohio Capital Journal found that some of those flights were the kind of journeys most Ohioans would undertake armed with a Honda Accord and a hot Sheetz coffee: Columbus to Cleveland, Columbus to Youngstown, Columbus to Port Clinton. So not long drives, short flights then? One Republican put it to him bluntly: “Park the damn jet.”
When childcare costs came up last year, he suggested Ohio could make life easier for parents by keeping children in school until 4 p.m. and potentially moving toward year-round schooling. It was an impressive inversion of populism: instead of making childcare cheaper — simply make childhood shorter. The proposal was contained in a casual social-media exchange, rather than a formal policy announcement, his campaign later stressed. That nevertheless disappeared when the video was reposted. Oops.
None of this would matter if Ramaswamy were cruising toward the governor’s mansion, which should be a given for a Republican in Ohio. Donald Trump carried the state three times, most recently by 11 points. Republicans hold every statewide non-judicial office. The last Democrat elected governor was Ted Strickland in 2006. Yet according to the latest Suffolk University/USA TODAY report, Ramaswamy is down nearly 10 points to Democrat Amy Acton, the former state health director who became one of Ohio’s most recognizable figures during Covid. Polymarket has dropped Ramaswamy’s odds of victory to just 34%. No doubt, some of Ramaswamy’s struggles are by proxy, driven by his affiliation with MAGA and the country’s growing dissatisfaction with the second Trump administration. But the own goals aren’t helping.
Some of the hostility is coming from an especially awkward direction. Ramaswamy spent years cultivating the Very Online Right, but portions of that movement have become increasingly hostile to him due to racism. Nick Fuentes has urged his followers to deny Ramaswamy the governorship and attacked his Indian heritage in explicitly racist terms. At conservative events, hecklers have challenged him on immigration and H-1B visas (of which Indians are the largest recipients by far). Ironically, the candidate who made his national reputation arguing that America should transcend identity politics has thus found himself confronting an identity problem inside his own coalition.
This may explain the increasingly desperate Ohio cosplay. But you have to pull the act off convincingly. Yes, you can memorize the right folksy talking points and put yourself in all the right photo-ops, but the ease with which a successful politician moves through those encounters is harder to acquire. Now, there’s a clip of him almost dropping a 10-year-old boy everywhere, with New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen declaring it “worse than Dukakis in the tank.”
Perhaps, but the real tank job here is one rapidly fading campaign for governor.
