Vivek Ramaswamy’s Political Career Has Been an Absolute Embarrassment. Good Riddance.

Politics Goodbye, Vivek Ramaswamy Rarely has a politician who has never even held office delivered such terrible results for his party. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Nitish Pahwa? Nov 03, 202611:30 PM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In mid-September, I was in Ohio tracking Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign for governor. This was about a month before the disastrous attack ad against his opponent, Amy Acton, and Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose was confidently predicting a “bright-red Ramaswamy tsunami.” On Tuesday night, it became clear what a mirage that wave always was. Ramaswamy officially became the first Republican Buckeye to lose a bid for the governor’s mansion in 20 years, coming up short against Acton by nearly 5 points. It was a wash for the entire GOP, just two years after Donald Trump’s reelection had supposedly ushered in a MAGA-friendly “vibe shift” for the historically purple state. And the candidate who will carry the real shame of this wipeout—perhaps even for Republicans across the country—is Ramaswamy, the self-styled millennial MAGA leader who may well make history as the man behind one of the ugliest political campaigns in recent memory. His loss reveals him to be a pathetic Trump wannabe who was simply too repulsive, too unlikable, too transparently hungry for power. Even before the disgraceful ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother elicited national blowback, the Ramaswamy campaign was associated with a particularly nasty promotional style. When I was in Ohio, every TV ad screamed attacks at me, looped to run during every commercial break possible, with hideous graphics and theatrical narrations. The Republican Governors Association’s PAC funded an ad that catapulted off a 2019 police report of a “verbal dispute” between Acton and her husband to characterize her as an incompetent drunk and drug addict. Another super PAC funded by Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, sent out mailers calling her a socialist. Ramaswamy’s own campaign ads and social media posts kept harping on Acton’s refusal to debate him—a line that, as I got to see for myself in a bar outside Cleveland, spurred a whole roomful of mostly old and white Ramaswamy supporters to flap their arms and sound chicken noises. And then there was the ad that brought Ramaswamy’s political incompetence into full view nationwide: He had Acton’s estranged mother—who stayed with Amy’s stepfather even after he was indicted for sexually abusing Acton as a child—to call her a liar on TV. (The campaign initially doubled down on that heinous ad before pulling it prematurely, having discovered that it only made Ohioans dislike Ramaswamy more.) The vitriol was all so loud, so suffocating, that it became the symbol of this race in the minds of the South Asian voters I spoke with in the Columbus metropolitan region. “This negative campaigning is so ugly,” said Shabana Siddiqi, a retired physician who’d initially liked Ramaswamy when he was running for president. “All these ads are just against the other person. You don’t know who they are, or what they believe.” She planned to vote for Amy Acton—as did almost every other South Asian Ohioan whom I spoke with, many of whom had voted for Trump in 2024. The strategy clearly didn’t work, but maybe it was all Ramaswamy had. It’s not just that he’s an inexperienced politician, but a consistently terrible one. His presidential run was effective at earning wider recognition, but he never got past single-digit polling numbers within the GOP primary field (and, remember, he was absolutely loathed by all his rivals). Before he announced his campaign for governor, he was set to join Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency. But then he managed to get booted from even that gig after he scolded Americans for hanging out at the mall instead of studying. I don’t know how he convinced himself that he’d somehow be able to make it work in a state as white and conservative as Ohio—I guess he figured he grew up there and had a lot of money to spend on it. In 2023, when I first covered Ramaswamy for Slate, I noted how much he wanted to come off as Trump but more—more “anti-woke,” more aggressive in both domestic and foreign policy, more loathsome of government and liberals and transgender people, more dismissive of the very real racism that festers within American society. That tack helped him rise within a MAGA world that faced durable setbacks after Trump’s 2020 loss and the ensuing riot at the Capitol. But it also helped lead the movement toward a far angrier and more rhetorically violent tack that inevitably came for Ramaswamy himself. It could have been different. After Ramaswamy caught an early wave of the burgeoning anti-Indian racism and anti-Hindu bigotry that’s since become endemic to the very MAGA movement he wished to lead, he spoke up about it. There was a consistent, open virulence that manifested just about everywhere Ramaswamy campaigned in Ohio, from Turning Point USA events to otherwise-unremarkable county rallies, enough that it forced the man into a brief moment of reflection. He wrote in a New York Times op-ed late last year that “it is downright unacceptable to spew poison toward Jews, Indians, or any other ethnic group” and nodded to some comity with Acton: “My current Democrat opponent in Ohio is a Jewish woman, and while I criticize her policy record unsparingly, I will be her most vocal defender against antisemitic attacks from left or right.” Such professed grace, it quickly became apparent, was entirely too limited in scope. In his bid to win over the unconvinced Christians who make up the bulk of Ohio’s electorate, Ramaswamy appeared with conservative pastors who made rather troubling statements about Jews. Ultimately, he couldn’t win Ohioans disgruntled with Trump’s second term and hoping for a new form of politics, nor could we win the Republicans who were empowered by Trump’s reelection to begin working toward a predominantly white, predominantly Christian society. Most importantly, he couldn’t outrun or transcend the broader currents that fueled a nationwide Republican rout: a wide-spanning backlash to MAGA, to billionaires, to slimy tech-world hucksters. Ramaswamy fashioned himself an avatar of everything Americans would come to especially disdain by 2026. And when he saw his grip slipping, he turned to the type of sheer hatred he otherwise claimed to abhor. The juvenile depravity he embodied couldn’t save him. He learned that the hard way, but not before bringing down American politics to deeper, uglier lows. Donald Trump Ohio Republicans 2026 Midterms