He was overly enthusiastic and annoying. While he was met with thunderous ovation when he praised Donald Trump (even from the former president himself), he was met with boos when he attacked Republican policy on climate change.
The people who disagreed with Vivek Ramaswamy scoffed and moaned under their breath and kept pronouncing his name wrong. “I’ve had enough of a guy who sounds like chatGPT,” Chris Christie declared. However, after seeing him on Wednesday’s first Republican presidential debate, many people couldn’t stop searching for his name online. And by morning of the next day, Ramaswamy had emerged as a serious contender.
“He just came in, and he’s terrific. Dave Carney, a seasoned Republican strategist in New Hampshire, remarked, “He’s very personable.” But as the night progressed, it became increasingly irritating.
That the rich young political newcomer could get support among voters is something Republicans may have to get used to. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign has been struggling, but Ramaswamy is closing the gap in national polling averages. On Wednesday, his position was front and centre.
With a broad grin on his face, Ramaswamy imitated DeSantis’s attempt to find the wind’s direction by sticking out his tongue, licking his finger, and holding it to the air. The biotech tycoon, projecting the kind of bluster that closes a deal in a boardroom, attempted to persuade former Vice President Mike Pence into agreeing to pardon Trump, but was unsuccessful. Pence then gave him a lesson on how pardons are awarded.
“It was like the adult and the impetuous teenager,” recalled Mike Murphy, a longtime Pence friend and ex-Republican member of the Indiana House of Representatives. When he started talking, “Pence just very calmly, somewhat more forcefully than I’m seeing Pence, shut him down.”
Pence attacked Ramaswamy earlier in the evening after the two got into an argument about the president’s authority and the country’s mounting debt. “I’m not sure I understood Mike Pence’s comment,” Ramaswamy said in response.
“If I may, let me try to explain it to you one more. During one of their heated arguments, Pence replied, “I will go slower this time.”
Pence’s inner circle views Ramaswamy, an ideological outsider who appeals to a new online populism, negatively.
One Pence adviser, speaking anonymously to discuss the dynamics between the vice president and the upstart Midwesterner, said, “He lives in and does well with a crowd that is very online.” “That’s a very narrow view of the electorate,” he said.
Critics in the larger political consultant class had a dim view of Ramaswamy.
“Say what you will about his performance tonight, Ramaswamy definitely locked up the ‘worst guy in your freshman philosophy class’ vote,” remarked one top Democratic strategist following the debate.
Republican strategist Kevin McLaughlin said, “Nikki Haley just stuffed Vivek in a locker.” A Republican communications expert named Matt Whitlock referred to Ramaswamy’s new design concept as “from Harry Potter.”
Ramaswamy, without a doubt, was the debate’s biggest star, and he provided Republican voters with the most Trump-like option available. Trump also made waves in 2016 with his off-putting comments, questionable policy proposals, and dogged determination to steal the spotlight.
According to Tim Miller, a former GOP strategist turned Trump critic, “I don’t know, necessarily, that his presentation style is quite as appealing as Trump’s,” and “I can’t really get my head inside what the median MAGA person in Ottumwa, Iowa thinks about his style,” due to the fact that he is 38 years old, is Hindu, and has other things going on. On the issues, however, he was the closest match to Trump, and that’s what Republican people want right now.
Everyone is looking at him. More than a million individuals have searched for “Vivek Ramaswamy” on Google in the past 24 hours (and that’s just the folks who spelt his name correctly), with the highest peak occurring during the debate. Ramaswamy’s sudden popularity sent him to the top of Google’s daily search trends, where he stayed for many days, outranking topics like the upcoming U.S. Open match involving the Inter Miami soccer team, Rudy Giuliani’s arrest, and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s supposed death.
“He’s got an unbelievable pulse on where the base is, and it’s coming from a place of conviction,” said Mike Biundo, senior adviser to the Ramaswamy-approved American Exceptionalism super PAC. He’s been spending a lot of time in Iowa and New Hampshire, talking to voters one-on-one and holding town halls. He knows how to connect with the party’s core supporters.
In addition to Pence’s lecture and Christie’s “ChatGPT” put-down, former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley told Ramaswamy he would “make America less safe,” chastising him for having “no foreign policy experience — and it shows.”
Haley had already given Ramaswamy fair warning that she would be coming for him during the debate by making a statement on Monday in which she criticised his plan to reduce U.S. military aid to Israel.
According to one of Haley’s advisors, “she just thinks his foreign policy is ridiculous,” and Ramaswamy is “an absurd excuse for a presidential candidate.”
Carney said that while some of Ramaswamy’s positions would appeal to Trump-supporting Republican voters, he has “set the ceiling for himself” by attempting to take on issues that are less likely to be widely embraced by conservatives, such as his discussion of Israel, his questioning of what happened on 9/11, and his call to raise the voting age.
“The problem we have is people trying to mimic the magic Donald Trump had in ’15 and ’16,” Carney said, noting that no contender has been able to make absurd promises like Trump did (“Mexico is going to pay for the border wall”).
Some Republican strategists admitted that Ramaswamy would gain at least temporarily from Wednesday’s publicity because of the attention he received.
Republican strategist Bob Heckman said, “Ramaswamy probably gets a small bump, but I don’t know how you get the nomination by insulting everyone in the room.”
