Vivek Ramaswamy opens run for Ohio governor

Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate who briefly aided President Donald Trump’s government-restructuring efforts, announced his candidacy for governor of Ohio on Monday, vowing to place the state at the forefront of a “second industrial revolution” in the United States.

Addressing a crowd of about a hundred supporters at an aerospace company’s industrial facility in West Chester Township, a suburb of his hometown Cincinnati, Ramaswamy cast his candidacy as an extension of Trump’s efforts in Washington.

“This is not a one-man job,” he said, referring to Trump’s election. “If we’re all going to be saved as a people, it’s going to be because all of us here step up and save ourselves, and that starts with the states.”

Ramaswamy, 39, who rose to prominence as a conservative critic of liberal corporate governance, was a long-shot but high-profile candidate in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. He dropped out of the race after a distant fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses and quickly rebranded himself as a tireless booster of Trump and his agenda.

That fueled speculation that he would be considered for a post in Trump’s Cabinet. Instead, he was named to lead the president’s Department of Government Efficiency task force alongside Elon Musk.

But before Trump took office, Ramaswamy found himself caught up in the political divisions and personal rivalries of the new president’s circle. In December, he infuriated immigration hard-liners in Trump’s coalition by defending the H-1B visa program to admit skilled immigrants and arguing on the social platform X that “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”

Tensions also soon mounted between Ramaswamy and Musk, who took a similar position in the visa argument but did not see eye to eye with Ramaswamy on the task force. The White House announced Ramaswamy’s exit the day Trump took office.

Angela Settell, a local Republican activist who attended the rally, said she was not concerned about the brief and rocky nature of Ramaswamy’s tenure in Trump’s orbit.

“He was a good choice for DOGE but there never should have been two people running it, there should just be one person,” Settell, of nearby Loveland, said. As for the fight over visas, “most people don’t even know what it is,” she said.

Ramaswamy has cast his ambitions for Ohio as complementary to Trump’s project of overhauling Washington and a continuation of his work with Musk’s task force, which is aiming to disassemble a wide array of federal government programs.

“President Trump is reviving our conviction in America,” he said. “We require a leader here at home who will revive our conviction in Ohio.”

In West Chester, Ramaswamy made no reference to his work with Musk. In his speech, he focused heavily on traditional Republican priorities like cutting taxes and regulation in Ohio, and he described educational achievement as “the single-most important crisis that frankly neither major political party is talking or doing enough about.” Among other things, he promised to ban cellphones in schools.

Ramaswamy signaled his intentions to run for governor of Ohio last month, and he has hired a number of operatives close to Trump and Vice President JD Vance to work on his campaign.

The hires suggest he enjoys at least the tacit support of Trump. The president has not yet endorsed a candidate in the primary contest, which will be held next year, but he had urged Mike DeWine, Ohio’s Republican governor, to appoint Ramaswamy to finish Vance’s Senate term.

DeWine chose Jon Husted, his lieutenant governor, to fill the seat instead — a decision that set off a game of musical chairs in the governor’s race, where Husted was expected to be a favorite for the Republican nomination. Dave Yost, Ohio’s attorney general, and Robert Sprague, the state treasurer, both declared candidacies.

Their ambitions were soon complicated by Ramaswamy, whose presidential candidacy and ubiquity in Republican politics and conservative media since then have made him one of the GOP’s most visible figures despite a very short resume in Republican politics. He has never run for office in Ohio before, and he was registered to vote as an independent as recently as 2021.

Sprague dropped his bid and endorsed Ramaswamy this month. Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, has also backed Ramaswamy.

Yost, like Ramaswamy, is vying for Trump’s endorsement. He and his team visited Washington this month and met with members of Trump’s White House staff, but they did not meet the president himself, according to a person briefed on the matter.

In his speech, Ramaswamy promised to be “conservative without being combative” in his primary contest with Yost. He criticized the “Anthony Fauci knockoff who allowed our public schools to be closed” during the COVID-19 pandemic — an apparent reference to Amy Acton, the former director of the state Department of Health, the only declared Democratic candidate in the governor’s race so far.