‘To call it a groundswell of people asking me to do this would be an understatement,’ Ramaswamy tells NR about a prospective run for Ohio governor.
Oxford, Ohio — In a political universe that’s full of wannabe presidents, there are few people who understand the art of shameless self-promotion better than Vivek Ramaswamy.
Months after suspending his long-shot presidential campaign, this Cincinnati native, Harvard College and Yale Law School graduate, and centimillionaire biotech entrepreneur might have found a new pet political interest — a potential run for Ohio governor in 2026.
“Six months ago, I would’ve told you no chance,” Ramaswamy told National Review in a brief walk-and-talk interview on Thursday afternoon on his way out of a Miami University College Republicans event. Running to be chief executive of Ohio was not on his radar when he exited the GOP presidential primary back in January and immediately endorsed Donald Trump, he maintains. “But the more I’ve traveled the state,” he says, “we have leaders across the state, grassroots activists, that are compelling me and drafting me into this. And so, I have to give it serious consideration.”
Helping Trump and this year’s Ohio GOP Senate nominee Bernie Moreno win “is by far” his top priority until November 5. But, after that, he’ll “be making some decisions about what the next step looks like.”
And he doesn’t leave it there. “To call it a groundswell of people asking me to do this would be an understatement, and I have to give it consideration,” he said of a prospective run for two-term governor Mike DeWine’s seat. “I owe it to the country and to the state to consider it strongly.”
This is the Vivek Ramaswamy we’ve all come to know — an extremely ambitious, high-energy smooth talker who just loves the game.
On the 2024 presidential-campaign trail, Ramaswamy surrogates loved to say that he “doesn’t have to be doing this” — “this” being the sacrifice of running for president. He could be sitting at home with the hundreds of millions he has made from his successful career as a biotech CEO, or perhaps he could start a new company. But one encounter with this 39-year-old makes it immediately clear that this is a man who cannot and will not retire early.
These days, he uses that same line for other candidates. “Bernie doesn’t have to be doing this,” he told the crowd of college students at Miami University during an onstage conversation alongside Senate nominee and former car dealer Bernie Moreno. To avoid being a career politician such as Moreno’s opponent — three-term Senate candidate Sherrod Brown — Ramaswamy advises the college students in the audience to make it their life goal to “stay curious and do something that’s uncomfortable.” Invoking his own life motto, he said: “You can really be the kind of person who’s wired to reinvent yourself over the course of your life by staying curious, by taking the kinds of risks that are hard to take in a different stage of your career.”
Ramaswamy is certainly wired that way. Despite having dropped out of the presidential race in January, he never lets a media opportunity go to waste. After his remarks last Thursday, Ramaswamy finds Moreno and conservative columnist Ben Shapiro backstage in a media gaggle. “Feel free to join,” I tell him, standing next to another reporter. After checking which outlets we work for — National Review and the New York Post — he’s game.
NR kicks off the gaggle by asking all three about the Democratic ticket’s strategic decision to respond to Republicans’ illegal-immigration-related talking points by reminding voters that Trump killed a bipartisan border deal earlier this year. Shapiro and Moreno say voters aren’t buying that argument because they see the disastrous results of Biden’s decision to roll back scores of Trump-era border-related executive orders.
Then Ramaswamy takes the floor. “My view is we’re a nation of laws, but we actually have too many laws, actually. And part of our failure is we’re not enforcing the laws that are already on the books.” He then takes the conversation of “modern partisan politics” back to “first principles.” When you have “redundant laws that could be used to actually enforce exactly the thing they were passed to address, but they’re not being enforced, and then you pass a new law,” you get “legislative confusion.” So, Democrats’ argument about whether Trump should have supported the bipartisan border bill becomes “moot,” he continues, because “if you enforce the laws that are already in the books, you can actually address the border crisis — 70 percent of it — as it exists today.”
He’s not everyone’s cup of tea. In fact, he has a boatload of conservative critics — many of whom are on this masthead — who think he’s inauthentic or over the top. But, to his credit, he is a gifted public speaker with an audience to show for it — even if those followers didn’t exactly help him deliver a showstopping performance in the Iowa caucuses. As of this writing, he has 2.7 million followers on X.
He’s in his element when talking to young conservatives, no surprise for someone whose campaign shtick was about “reviving purpose and conviction in the next generation of American citizens.” Stylistically, he owns the tech-bro aesthetic, deciding to run with a black T-shirt and blazer, complete with an American-flag lapel pin, for Thursday’s event. He says the word “actually” a lot, whether the topic is illegal immigration, his plan for dismantling the “nanny state,” or his helping Trump win the 2024 election.
The phrase “Make America Great Again” isn’t “just about reviving some vision of the 1990s country that I grew up in,” he told Thursday’s audience. “We want to make America greater than it’s ever been, actually. . . . It’s not about chasing the past, it’s about chasing the future. And I do think that’s what you get with outsiders like Bernie, like Donald Trump, that I think we need, frankly, more of in politics.”
Ahead of the Iowa caucuses, Ramaswamy’s Trump-lite campaign finally went too far for the former president’s liking when it decided to print shirts that read: “Save Trump, Vote Vivek.” The former president didn’t hold back. “Vivek started his campaign as a great supporter,” he wrote in a January 13 Truth Social post. “Unfortunately, now all he does is disguise his support in the form of deceitful campaign tricks. Very sly, but a vote for Vivek is a vote for the ‘other side.’ . . . Vivek is not MAGA.”
After Ramaswamy dropped out, Trump warmed up to him. But the pre–Iowa caucus social-media post was a warning — don’t go overboard when selling Trump’s brand. So, these days, Ramaswamy lets Trump do the talking. Asked by NR last Thursday whether he has spoken recently with the former president or his transition team about a role in a potential second Trump administration, Ramaswamy said with a smile: “I’ll refer you to his comments at the rally last night.”
In other words, he has finally gotten the answer he had been waiting for.
“How about Vivek? Great guy. We are going to bring him in. I don’t want to tell him yet exactly,” Trump said at an October 9 rally in Reading, Pa., adding that he wants to win before promising prospective hires specific administration posts. “He’s going to be a part of something that’s going to be really big. Thank you, Vivek. Great job.”