Haven't We Already Elected Enough Awful Governors?

What's the deal with Vivek Ramaswamy, and why would he be a disaster for Ohio?

Aug 08, 2025

Many of you might not spend much time considering your governor. Even though there are only 50 of them (not counting territories and assorted relics of our imperialist past), we know a whole lot less about governors than about the people in the US House or Senate who represent us. That doesn’t make much sense, if you stop and think about it. Your state’s governor is in an executive-level office (like the presidency) and has a great deal of power when it comes to affecting your everyday life. Heck, there are twice as many sitting senators as there are governors, but I’ll bet name recognition is far higher for the senators. Interesting bit of trivia there: seventeen US Senators have been elected to the presidency, and seventeen state Governors have been elected President. So judging by that metric, your governor is twice as likely as your senator to move on to higher office someday (at least that specific higher office). You need to know about who’s in that office.

(Original photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Which brings us to Vivek Ramaswamy. Vivek is running for Ohio Governor in 2026, and he’s already been endorsed by the Ohio Republican Party (more than a year in advance of the election, which is highly unusual). A big piece of that comes from his pre-existing relationship with J.D. Vance and Donald Trump, but all of it led me to consider the fact that many Ohioans know next to nothing about the man.

Since Ramaswamy is turning 40 this Saturday, in honor of his birthday I decided to spend a few hours looking into this paragon of Republicanism in order to further educate myself (and you). You’re welcome!

First, some rapid-fire Vivek Facts®. Vivek was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. His current net worth is 1.1 billion dollars, which makes him pretty representative of most Ohioans (that’s incredibly subtle sarcasm, if you didn’t catch it). He was born to Indian immigrants. Vivek’s mother is a psychiatrist and his father is an engineer who later became a patent lawyer. He was the valedictorian of his high school class (at St. Xavier High School), and then went to Harvard for his bachelor’s degree in biology. He made $7 million working for a hedge fund and graduated from Yale in 2013 with a law degree. He met his wife-to-be at Yale, and then started a pharmaceutical company called Roivant Sciences. He made a great deal of money while at Roivant, not because he was especially smart or an especially talented leader, but because of a few very lucky guesses, when his company bought medications that others had invented. In 2020, he started writing op-eds and increasing his national visibility, mostly by arguing that corporations needed to stop caring so much about social issues.

Ramaswamy stepped down as Roivant’s CEO in January 2021 and then immediately published his first book. In 2023, he announced a run for the Presidency, and dropped out of the race after getting only 7.7% of the vote in the Iowa caucuses. He endorsed Donald Trump the same day he stopped running, which makes sense for a guy who was quite possibly only running to be a spoiler for Trump in the first place. In November of 2024, it was announced that he would be co-heading up DOGE with Elon Musk (a real ‘Assistant to the Regional Manager’ situation, if you ask me). He quit that post on January 21st, the first day of the new administration. And now he’s running to be Governor of the great state of Ohio.

Now don’t you feel just crammed full of information about Vivek Ramaswamy? Or is that just a touch of indigestion? Or both, perhaps? Either way, I’m sure you’re happy to know all those facts about the man who just might be the downfall of the Ohio GOP. And now for some deeper digging.

While CEO of Roivant, Ramaswamy had a couple of high-profile wins when (as I noted earlier) he was able to identify some medications that ended up being successful when the company took them over. But he had at least one high-profile scandal when he was at the company that you should definitely know about.

Rebecca Robbins, Maureen Farrell and Jonathan Weisman described it thusly:

In 2015, Mr. Ramaswamy whipped up hype and investment around one of his finds, a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s disease being developed by one of his subsidiaries, Axovant. Two years later, a clinical trial showed that it did not work, erasing more than $1.3 billion in Axovant’s stock value in a single day.

Let’s look a bit deeper into this. What exactly happened with this Alzheimer’s drug that didn’t help Alzheimer’s, and what was Vivek’s role in perpetrating this large-scale scam on the American public? It’s a pretty dark story, especially when you think about the desperation of those with Alzheimer’s (and their families). As Sam Nunberg writes in Newsweek,

In June 2015, Ramaswamy appeared on CNBC to praise the Axovant IPO, which soared to over $30 a share based on expectations surrounding its Alzheimer's drug, Intepirdine. The drug was touted as a "breakthrough," yet upon closer examination, this development fell apart.

It wasn’t just his company. Vivek himself was out there acting like advertiser-in-chief for this utter failure of a drug. And was it more than just Vivek acting as mascot for this drug? Sam Nunberg continues,

Axovant had acquired the drug for $5 million in December 2014, six months before the IPO, after the majority of Phase 2 trials had "failed to meet their primary endpoints" in 2010. Ramaswamy devised a solution: His mother, Dr. Geetha Ramaswamy, conducted a new Phase 2 trial in 2015 involving "684 subjects." This trial conveniently claimed to demonstrate sufficient improvement to "support Phase 3" trials.

Can you believe that? Vivek had his own mother do a second Phase 2 trial with a tiny pool of subjects. And amazingly, miraculously, Vivek’s mom discovered the opposite of the other studies. She discovered that her son’s drug helped patients in her study, so it was decided that her son’s company should move forward with the medication. Hmmmmmmm. In Sam Nunberg’s recounting,

The aftermath was a triumphant $350 million IPO in 2015, followed by a drastic fall. By September 2017, the stock had plummeted 75 percent after Ramaswamy and his mother announced the Phase 3 trial's failure. Subsequent trials continued to disappoint, culminating in a 99 percent loss in value and a name change for the company.

Ouch. So here’s a pretty clear-cut example of a financial scam that Vivek was intimately involved in. How did Roivant do aside from this situation? Was it just a blip? The Sam Nunberg piece in Newsweek continues,

The reality is that Roivant's finances were abysmal under Ramaswamy's watch. During his tenure in 2019, the company's net operating loss exceeded $530 million. By 2020, the losses had doubled to over $1 billion, accompanied by a 65 percent decline in revenue.

Vivek Ramaswamy is simply the farthest possible thing from a financial genius. In much the same way that his beloved Donald Trump has moved from business deal to business deal, costing shareholders and business partners billions of dollars as he continues to enrich himself, Vivek has always made financial decisions that are centered on helping only himself.

In an article for the New York Times, Rebecca Robbins, Maureen Farrell and Jonathan Weisman explain the thought process behind Ramaswamy’s next venture:

A classmate of Mr. Ramaswamy’s from an all-boys Catholic high school in Cincinnati, Mr. Frericks, had worked as an executive at Anheuser-Busch and shared Mr. Ramaswamy’s views about the E.S.G. movement.
Mr. Frericks said they knocked several ideas around: “Merit Airlines,” which would hire the top 5 percent of pilots, regardless of race, sex or background; “Pop Without Politics,” an alternative to Coca-Cola; and a “free-speech” version of Twitter, before Mr. Musk ran with the idea and bought the social media platform.
They ultimately landed on a different idea. They would start an investment firm near Columbus, Ohio, that would court an audience they believed had been neglected by Wall Street: everyday investors and public pension fund managers who were alienated by companies adopting liberal policies pushed by money managers like Mr. Fink.

As awful a name as “Pop Without Politics” is, we’ll never know if it would have been a success. It appears that Vivek’s new investment firm (which advertised itself as being “anti-woke”) wasn’t managed very well. Vivek himself spent a great deal of time trying to convince Republican governors of red states to invest their state’s money in his fund, and it made money. Just not that much money in comparison to their competitors like BlackRock. I’ve seen multiple sources talk about how employees weren’t really sure what they were supposed to be doing, and how Vivek would show up to work in shorts.

Beyond his many massive financial losses at all of his companies, keep in mind that during his presidential run, he raised almost $51 million and spent all but $85,000 of that total, which is not great if you’re one of his donors. Since only 8,449 Iowans voted for Vivek in that caucus, the math works out to him spending a little more than $6,000 per vote. If he maintained that expenditure level, then winning 51% of the vote in Ohio (if all our registered voters voted, which they won’t) would cost him somewhere in the neighborhood of $24 billion. Not even Vivek Ramaswamy is going to raise that much money in a race for the Ohio gubernatorial election, so that’s good for us, if not especially good for him.

To hammer the financial point home, back to Sam Nunberg in his Newsweek article:

Ramaswamy has funded his campaign through the sale of over $32 million in Roivant stock options in February of this year. This could lead one to believe that Roivant, based in Bermuda, is thriving and that Ramaswamy is a great entrepreneur. Except the company reported staggering losses of $1.2 billion in its financial report of March 2023. This isn't a one-time slump: In March 2022, when Ramaswamy was still Roivant's chairman and a major shareholder, the company reported an annual loss of $924.1 million.

Do we know a lot about what makes Vivek tick? No. Do we know a lot about his underlying value structure? Also no. That’s because he has seemed to sway whichever way the wind blows, if he sees a potential profit for him in taking a specific position. He doesn’t seem all that committed to anything he pretends to care about, as we see in this depressing quote from Benjamin Wallace-Wells in the New Yorker:

As recently as this past winter, when he was making waves on Fox News with anti-woke pronouncements, Ramaswamy often sounded callow: bored by political details, shamed by the failure of the anti-Alzheimer’s drug on which he had largely bet his company, and somewhat personally isolated. “I feel like the public advocacy, or whatever you call what I’ve been doing in the last couple of years, has eroded more friendships than new friendships made up for it,” he told Sheelah Kolhatkar then. It felt like a very long way to the Presidency.

He has expressed a great variety of ‘deeply-held beliefs’ during his time as a public figure, many of them deeply odd and contradictory. But one of the fundamental arguments he has been consistent in making is expressed thusly in his first book, as Nick Tabor writes for Brittanica,

He argued in the book that when corporations wade into social issues—for instance, by instituting diversity quotas in hiring or by divesting from companies that pollute the environment—the practice tends to be both cynical, a ploy to increase profits or deflect attention from unethical deeds, and corrosive to democracy, because it imposes these social priorities on the public.

Hence the title of the book, “Woke Inc.”

But just how committed is Vivek to these “anti-woke” principles he’s always going on about? Does he really even believe this, and is he putting his money where his mouth is? Let’s see what Dan Primack said about that in Axios:

The drug company founded by and formerly led by anti-ESG and DEI crusader Vivek Ramaswamy has a nonprofit arm whose official mission now includes increasing the racial and gender diversity of pharma industry leadership.
Ramaswamy maintains a 7.2% equity stake in Roivant Sciences, valued at over half a billion dollars…He stepped down as Roivant's CEO in early 2021, but remained company chairman until announcing his candidacy four months ago. Roivant Social Ventures…was launched in 2020 when Ramaswamy was still the parent company's CEO…According to its website, RSV partners with and sometimes invests in outside companies and groups to help create "systemic improvements to health equity."
RSV also takes a keen interest in "building DEI opportunities for future leaders in biopharma and biotech." The group's CEO, Lindsay Androski, wrote a September 2022 op-ed for the LA Times titled: "Why the lack of diversity in drug industry leadership is hurting women and people of color."

Oh. So he says he hates DEI, but he has funded both of his campaigns from money generated in large part by DEI initiatives from his company. Here’s another author discussing the hypocrisy of Vivek’s fortune (and the ironic source of plenty of his campaign funds), from Sam Nunberg in Newsweek:

The answer might lie in Ramaswamy's implementation of Roivant's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiative, called Roivant Social Ventures, during his CEO tenure. Launched in 2020 while Ramaswamy was still CEO, this initiative aimed to foster "DEI opportunities for future leaders in biopharma and biotech."
While Ramaswamy vocally opposes ESG principles, Roivant's major institutional investors—including Morgan Stanley, Viking Global, and BlackRock, the very firms he criticizes by name—are among its largest stakeholders, owning over 500 million shares. Ramaswamy himself holds more than 80 million shares, making him an essential partner of these major ESG funds.
In a deeply ironic twist, Ramaswamy's anti-"woke" campaign is being bankrolled by the profits reaped from the very policies he denounces.

I’ll say it again: Vivek Ramaswamy is a fraud. He cares about himself, and that’s all. Nobody should vote for this man for any elected office, under any circumstances.

Let’s go back to Sam Nunberg, who agrees with me:

Vivek Ramaswamy's artful narrative, meticulously tailored for the GOP primary voter, weaves a tale of principled sacrifice and success…While this narrative might seem appealing, it is akin to the endless "flip-flops" that have plagued his campaign—an elaborate work of fiction that unravels upon a modicum of scrutiny.

Vivek also spends a lot of time and money trying to get people to think he’s cool. It’s clear that he’s never let go of some feelings of inadequacy from childhood, as evidenced by a few tweets that have made folks very angry. Carl Weiser from the Cincinnati Enquirer summed that controversy up, in case you’ve forgotten:

"A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers," he wrote. "A culture that venerates Cory from 'Boy Meets World,' or Zach & Slater over Screech in 'Saved by the Bell,' or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in 'Family Matters,' will not produce the best engineers." "More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers," he continued. "More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less 'chillin.' More extracurriculars, less 'hanging out at the mall.'

I don’t know of any presidential candidates who have the time to worry about a lot of specific fictional characters from 90s TV shows, even ones who Vivek Ramaswamy obviously deeply identified with in his younger years. I really wish that Vivek would spend his billion dollars to buy himself some friends rather than trying to buy himself a governorship.

How should we characterize Vivek’s presidential campaign? Writing for ABC News, Kendal Ross summed up Vivek’s approach during the race:

The biotech entrepreneur and conservative commentator campaigned in a blunt-talking manner, with a penchant for provocation and spreading conspiracy theories.

Sounds a lot like the picture of Vivek that we’re painting here—he tries to upset people and spreads nonsense wherever he goes. But is there any deeper level to his underlying belief system? In the New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells said:

Ramaswamy has been described as “anti-woke” and as a “non-white candidate peddling racist dog whistles,” but neither captures what is unique about his candidacy. Unlike DeSantis, for whom “anti-woke” is a banner under which to advance aggressive social-conservative policy items, Ramaswamy uses it as a way to attack the connective tissue of power—a liberal consensus of anti-racism, “climatism, COVID-ism, globalism.”

So okay. He doesn’t necessarily espouse any particular conservative ideals, but is more about going after issues he can conflate into one huge blob of a conspiracy theory stew. Awesome. In Brittanica, Nick Tabor summed up some more of Vivek’s campaign platform:

He called for raising the standard voting age to 25, restricting birthright citizenship, and sending the U.S. military to Mexico to “annihilate” drug cartels. He pledged to fire more than 75 percent of the federal workforce and disband the FBI, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Department of Education (and to abolish teacher unions as well). He argued that people should “be proud to live a high-carbon lifestyle” and claimed that “more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”

So he’s got strong opinions on climate change? For Teen Vogue, Anoushka Lal says:

As a self-proclaimed “scientist,” he has said the "climate change agenda is a hoax” that is killing more people than the climate crisis itself. There is no evidence to support this statement. Going a step further, Ramaswamy contends that "human flourishing requires fossil fuels," and asserts that "the solution to temperature-related deaths lies in increased fossil fuel abundance." However, 2021 research highlighted by The Guardian indicates that fossil fuels were linked to 8.7 million premature deaths in 2018, contributing to almost one-fifth of all global fatalities that year. The vast majority of Gen Z adults express concern about climate change, but Ramaswamy vows to "abandon the climate cult."

It appears that he’s looking everywhere he can to find controversial statements, in the hope of owning the libs or something? None of these positions are especially internally consistent, but that’s pretty typical of Vivek, as you can see.

How about more of Vivek’s policy platforms that will really make a big difference in the lives of Ohioans? Here’s one noted by John Kosich at News 5 Cleveland:

He said part of creating that business-friendly environment would be eliminating the capital gains tax in Ohio. "That's part of the first step to eventually get to zero income taxation," he said. "The beauty of getting rid of capital gains taxation in Ohio is the fact that actually we don't even as a state derive that much revenue from it and yet it is a great point to draw other entrepreneurs and capital owners to the state."

Note that the tax he is suggesting we eliminate is something that he admits is hardly ever used (and when it is, it’s used by incredibly wealthy folks like Vivek himself). Meaningless policy proposals that might sound good to some conservatives, but are ultimately hollow.

I appreciate this quote from Benjamin Wallace-Wells’s in the New Yorker:

For a moment at least, Ramaswamy had pulled the elemental trick of both a politician and a huckster: making a banal idea seem forgotten, and new.

I agree. Vivek Ramaswamy is committed to one thing, and one thing only: being a huckster. Enriching himself at the expense of everyone else, and quitting when things get too challenging. He does not actually appear to have any principles or any coherent values.

What do his campaigning skills look like? I’ve seen plenty of sources note this point, but Rebecca Robbins, Maureen Farrell and Jonathan Weisman said in the New York Times:

He set a busy pace, using private jets to crisscross the United States and traveling with a body guard. He hated staying in hotel rooms, so if he traveled he would nearly always fly home to sleep.

You heard that right. The man would “nearly always fly home to sleep”. While campaigning to be President of the United States. Again, he’s a real man of the people. Has he changed his habits since then? Nope. In a piece on Signal Ohio, Andrew Tobias recently wrote:

He’s opting to travel across the state, sometimes flying round trip in the same day, in a private jet the Columbus-area billionaire personally owns. Federal flight records show that Ramaswamy has flown on his jet from one Ohio city to another at least 18 times since he launched his campaign for governor in late February.
These flights made for quick trips out of what would have been long car rides for typical Ohioans…The flights include trips to Lincoln Day Dinner fundraisers sponsored by Republican county parties. For instance, flight records show he flew April 18 from Columbus to Portsmouth for a Scioto County Republican Party event. On May 17, he boarded his plane to go from Columbus to Akron for an appearance before the Summit County Republican Party. He stayed overnight for both trips before flying home, flight logs show.

It’s worth noting here that he’s at least slightly grown, since he was willing to put himself through the agony of staying in a hotel room for Ohioans. Twice! Andrew Tobias continues,

Ramaswamy also flew from Columbus to Cleveland five times. Two of these trips, on May 9 and June 9, were roundtrips on a single day. Ramaswamy’s campaign finance report shows his campaign spent nearly $160,000 leasing the jet from V Leasing, a company whose corporate address matches that of a home he owns in the Cincinnati area. V Leasing is the corporate owner of the plane Ramaswamy is traveling on…His state campaign finance records show Ramaswamy loaned his campaign $230,000 at the end of June to cover the cost of the plane’s use…Since Ramaswamy’s plane is technically owned by a corporation, V Leasing, using it without documenting it could run afoul of campaign finance law.
That’s because Ohio law bans political candidates from accepting direct corporate contributions..So Ramaswamy must essentially rent the plane at fair market value from his own company if he wants to use it.

In his piece, Andrew Tobias credits a ‘longtime Republican campaign finance attorney’ with this incredibly dystopian ‘joke’ about Vivek’s campaign:

“Every single billionaire who has run for governor of Ohio has owned a plane,” Brey joked.

I think that’s pretty illustrative of all the problems I have with Vivek. He does not share a common lived experience with Ohioans, and he does not understand why most of us would drive from campaign stop to campaign stop. He’s a billionaire, so why should he care about the cost?

Remember how I said I don’t think he even wanted to be president? Sam Nunberg agreed with me, when he wrote:

Ramaswamy's latest scam appears to be his run for president. The 38-year-old presidential candidate appears to have no serious interest in leading the nation. In fact, according to people who know Ramaswamy, the goal of his campaign seems to be to block Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' path to the nomination by running as a MAGA-adjacent candidate.

I’d say that sounds just like Vivek Ramaswamy. Pretend, rile people up, generate profit for yourself, and move on to the next scam.

Where does Ramaswamy stand on education? He’s in favor of curtailing academic freedom in classrooms. He talks about education a lot, actually. One of his primary plans for Ohio’s educational system is noted by Eva Terry in Deseret News:

If elected, meritocracy will not only apply to students in classrooms, but Ohio “will be the first state in the country to implement merit based pay for every teacher, principal, superintendent and administrator in our public schools,” he said.
“Our best public school teachers deserve to be paid a lot more than they are right now,” Ramaswamy said. “With merit based compensation, Ohio will be a magnet for the best educators across the country.”

Here’s the thing about merit pay. It’s an awful idea. Vivek thinks it would make teachers work harder (as though most of our teachers could possibly be more dedicated or hard-working). In reality, it pushes teachers toward prioritizing the teaching of things that might be on standardized exams, since teacher pay is shamefully low. He also wants to abolish teacher’s unions, which is a similarly awful idea.

Did you read my newsletter last week, about President Trump’s horrific new Executive Order that manages to get a staggering amount of facts wrong while proposing awful new ways to destroy the lives of you and your fellow Americans? If so, you’ll know where I’m going with my criticism of another of Ramaswamy’s policy proposals for the state of Ohio. As Eva Terry from Deseret News says:

Ramaswamy proposed the way to end the “wave of violent crime,” by empowering police officers with training, respecting Second Amendment rights and bringing back psychiatric institutions…During his campaign for the presidency, Ramaswamy explained his position on bringing back mental institutions to “The Young Turks.” He said pharmaceutical companies benefit from psychiatric facilities and said he would instead implement facilities that are faith-based.
“That is not compassion, that is cruelty to everyone involved, and we’ll put an end to it,” Ramaswamy said.

There is not a wave of violent crime. He’s lying. Violent crime is down, in most cases dramatically lower this year.
Vivek’s statement that violent crime is a problem, in conjunction with his call for faith-based mental institutions, shows that he has zero idea of the reforms that will actually help Ohioans. He is out of touch, and worse, he’s cruel.
I probably don’t have to tell anyone reading this newsletter just how awful the idea of throwing folks with a mental illness into private faith-based mental hospitals truly is, but in case you aren’t aware—do a little research. This is a ridiculous idea.

A lot has been said about the role that Gen Z and other young voters played in the disastrous 2024 US presidential election cycle. But hey, Vivek is only 39 (40 this weekend, remember). Surely that means he’ll get plenty of support from the younger portion of the Ohio electorate? Anoushka Lal addressed this point in Teen Vogue:

Ramaswamy’s rapid rise should be unsettling, particularly for members of my generation, Gen Z. For starters, he seems hell-bent on silencing us. One of the mind-boggling policies Ramaswamy is advocating for is to constitutionally raise the voting age from 18 to 25, with exceptions for military or first responder service. Ramaswamy would also require Gen Z Americans to “earn” this fundamental privilege of citizenship by passing a naturalization civics test. Meanwhile, Ramaswamy’s campaign consistently hounds young people for being unpatriotic and lacking a sense of national pride and purpose.

There aren’t many younger people who would witness this perspective and hear Vivek’s rhetoric on the subject and want to be a part of such a campaign, I’ll bet. Anoushka Lal continues,

Ramaswamy's logic for this proposed policy falls short on several levels. He seems to believe that stripping the vote from young Americans will somehow increase civic pride and engagement. In reality, this policy would disenfranchise tens of millions of Gen Z individuals, leading to one of the largest reductions of the US electorate in history. Also, this proposal echoes voting registration literacy tests that aimed to disenfranchise African American and immigrant voters, a practice that was curtailed only by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

That…is also not great. Regardless of the eventual fate of the Voting Rights Act, which seems more endangered today than it has been in my entire lifetime, thanks to our current Supreme Court. Anyway. It’s worth pointing out that Vivek Ramaswamy readily admits that prior to the 2024 election, he had only voted in two presidential elections in his entire life. It doesn’t sound like he’s all that civically engaged himself, does it?

I’ve saved the worst for last, because it’s just so terrible. After the racially-motivated murder of three Black people in Jacksonville, Florida, Vivek started to claim that atrocities like this one are the fault of those who would rather people not be racist. As Jeet Her wrote in the Nation,

In television appearances on Sunday news programs, Ramaswamy made a number of incendiary and obscene statements that blamed the mass murder on anti-racism. Speaking on CNN, Ramaswamy said, “The reality is we’ve created such a racialized culture in this country in the last several years…. as the last few burning embers of racism were burning out, we have a culture in this country largely created by media and establishment and universities and politicians that throw kerosene on that racism.” He added, “And I can think of no better way to fuel racism in this country than to take something away from other people on the basis of their skin color.” Ramaswamy made similar remarks on NBC’s Meet the Press, where he claimed to be “genuinely worried that we’re seeing a new wave of anti-Black and anti-Hispanic racism as a consequence of the so-called anti-racist movements.”

Just to make that point very clear, Vivek argues that trying to end racism…causes more pushback from racists, so…the racists are the victims, I guess? But this line of thinking is even more insidious and toxic than it seems on the surface, as Jeet Her continues:

Such candidates have had a niche in the GOP for nearly three decades, and Ramaswamy is satisfying the same perennial GOP appetite for a person of color who will bless the racial status quo as just. But there is one important distinction. Ramaswamy is a person of color—but he’s not Black. He’s of Tamil descent. As such, his message is a harsher one. He’s not saying as the earlier candidates did, “As a Black man who succeeded, I prove that America is not racist. Racism is a thing of the past.” Ramaswamy’s message rather is, “As a person of color, I prove that America is not racist. And if Black Americans are faltering, that is due to their own faults.”

That is repugnant thinking, friends. And beyond being repugnant, it encourages the worst kind of racist impulses among those who love to hear that they’re not racist, they’ve never been racist, and the real racists are people of color and their allies. Disgusting. Enough said.

The current occupant of this office, Governor Mike DeWine, is currently term-limited. So Vivek Ramaswamy, ridiculous scam artist that he is, is running in this momentous gubernatorial election without an incumbent to stand in the way. And who’s supporting him on the Ohio GOP’s part? Everyone. Nick Evans writes in Ohio Capital Journal:

More than a year out from election day, Ramaswamy has largely cleared the Republican field. He’s picked up endorsements from President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and the Ohio Republican Party. Prominent Republicans including Attorney General Dave Yost and Treasurer Robert Sprague saw the writing on the wall and abandoned their own bids for governor.

Oh wait, did I say everyone? Well, not everyone. Andrew Tobias from Signal Cleveland tells us,

Despite private opposition from Gov. Mike DeWine, Ramaswamy and his allies convinced the required two-thirds of the Ohio Republican Party’s central committee to issue an endorsement in the race. After that, it was a fait accompli to win a simple majority.

The sitting Governor of our state knows what an awful candidate Vivek is, and he appears to be extremely opposed to this decision by the state party. He and his inner circle tried to talk the central committee out of making this vote, but was ultimately unsuccessful. We’ll see next year if Governor DeWine was the smart one after all.

And I can’t end this week’s newsletter without pointing out that there are plenty of others who are tying themselves and their political fortunes to this scam artist. One of them, naturally, is one of Ashtabula County’s two State Representatives. I’ll let our own State Rep. David Thomas provide an enthusiastic endorsement in his own words:

The sheer fact that Rep. Thomas is such a huge supporter of Vivek probably tells you all you need to know about Ramaswamy’s honesty, compassion and fitness as a candidate.

I think I’ll let Sam Nunberg sum up Vivek Ramaswamy and his apparent goals:

It is part of a disturbing pattern with Ramaswamy, which goes something like this: Generate media buzz, pull out right before the crash, and leave a rubble behind for others to clean up.

That’s what it’s all about for Vivek. Don’t be fooled, don’t let your friends and family and neighbors be fooled, and do everything within your power to stop this man from getting another shred of power within this state.

Thanks for reading, and let me know if this helps you clarify your thoughts on the person I believe would be the very worst possible option for Ohio’s next governor. I don’t think any of us know what he truly believes, because I don’t know for sure that he truly believes anything at all. He would be a disaster.

Every Ohioan has a responsibility to do everything in our power to support anybody at all running against Vivek Ramaswamy. That said, Dr. Amy Acton would make an incredible governor (but that’s a different week’s newsletter). As a point of comparison between the two, Nick Evans notes in the Ohio Capital Journal:

Acton said she’s been driving around Ohio in a union-worker built Jeep “like a normal person,” while Ramaswamy “has given $160,000 of campaign funds to what appears to be one of his own companies (“V Leasing LLC”) for a private jet to fly in.”

That’s a pretty clear contrast between the two candidate, right? Please, please, please—do your research, folks.

And that’s all for now. Have a great rest of your week, and please share this newsletter with every single Ohio voter you know. We have to do something to stop this man.

And to you, Mr. Ramaswamy, I say: Go away, please. There are plenty of us in this state who are trying to make a positive difference, not just trying to get rich. Kthxbai.

Sources:

Haven't We Already Elected Enough Awful Governors?

What's the deal with Vivek Ramaswamy, and why would he be a disaster for Ohio?

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