With his official entry into the field as of last week, he now joins former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and former President Donald Trump as the only candidates officially in the field for the Republican Party. Trust me – there will be plenty more. This column will add to the growing program guide of candidates so you know what to look for on the debate stage, without any predispositions from me as to whether they’re the right person for the job or not.

The case for Vivek Ramaswamy for president:

• At least at the outset, he really has one issue set around which he’s building a campaign, albeit one that’s got tentacles into all sorts of areas of life and society GOP primary voters care about – anti-wokeness. He is going to be the crusader to stake out the anti-woke agenda in all of its various permutations. He certainly won’t be alone in his quest, but he seems to be laser-focused on it – whether it’s insidious curriculum being introduced in classrooms or whether it’s ESG affecting investments and retirement funds. It has long been said that politics is downstream from culture, and the woke/ESG/BLM/LGBTMIA+/progressive left agenda has been inflicting body blow after body blow on the culture for the last decades or so. Ramaswamy seems to want to use politics to push back at the advances made against the culture, and will use every opportunity possible to fight it, probably more so than any other candidate.
• Messaging – I’ve seen a lot of Ramaswamy on CNBC and Fox Business of late, and he’s been one of the more articulate messengers of conservatism that’s out there. Once he builds name ID, his ability to win over converts both within the Republican side as well as disaffected center-left voters, just like the ones that helped propel Glenn Youngkin to the governorship in Virginia almost a year and a half ago, will be on display. He’s very dynamic and passionate about the subjects on which he’s been booked to address.
• Timing could be right for a surprise – In the recent past, the unwritten rules for running for president were that you couldn’t have a funny-sounding name, you had to have some gray hair, and you had to run something at some level of government to be given a chance. The 2024 cycle has seen the last three presidents as being way too old to be considered effective, never having been inside government before winning the presidency, and serving two terms with a very funny-sounding name. Those unwritten rules don’t seem to apply anymore, and with people being as disaffected as they are both with current leadership and the establishment on the Republican side, if there’s a drive for a youth movement in leadership, it’s hard to get younger than a 37-year old. If he keeps his head down during some of the crossfire sniping by other potential candidates and stays on message and runs as a true outsider, he could capture lightning in a bottle if everyone else that’s expected to get in discounts him entirely and destroys each other. He could be the car that survives the demolition derby because it didn’t look like much of a threat when the race began.
• Funding – Money won’t be a problem for him. Typically, candidates without much name ID have a hard time getting small donors, and that’s what they need to survive because they don’t have enough cash of their own lying around and available to dump into a campaign. Not an issue with Ramaswamy, who as the head of Strive, a $550 million dollar asset management company, could make up the shortfall and self-finance early on. He also has very powerful friends like Peter Thiel and other Wall Street types who could help him finance in the early going until small donations kick in.

The case against Vivek Ramaswamy

• He really has no long-term track record to examine. What he’s said thus far sounds pretty good to a lot of people once you consider it, but there’s so much more about him that’s a complete unknown. We have no idea where he is on foreign policy, although he would like to completely divest from China. He told Hugh Hewitt earlier today he had no idea what the nuclear triad is. That caused Trump grief in 2016. It’s unbelievable a presidential candidate now wouldn’t know what the triad is. We have no idea what kind of judges he would pick, nor how he would convince a Congress controlled in the Senate by the Democrats (for now), and a razor-thin GOP majority in the House to go along with the radical tossing aside of all things woke. He doesn’t just want to make incremental moves. He wants to pull it out by the roots, which in theory is what needs to happen. How he handles political reality is something entirely different.
• How will he play with the others on stage? He said he was inspired by Trump to run, since Trump hadn’t held political office before and ran and governed in an unconventional manner. Does this mean he’ll treat Trump with kid gloves during the campaign and on debate stages? Or will he go after the former President and say it’s time for a new generation and try to show him the door? How will he handle the others on the stage, who agree with him on his desires to end woke in America?
• Does he really want to be president, or is this just to build his name and his brand for either a cabinet position or a future senate or governor run down the road? Mike DeWine will serve for four years, then Ohio will be looking for a new governor. If Ramaswamy can make a name for himself during the presidential cycle but comes up short, the Ohio native could position himself nicely to be the frontrunner to succeed DeWine in 2026, and he’d still barely be 40. He’s got oodles of time for presidential ambitions down the road, if that’s where his heart ultimately is.
• Name ID will still be his biggest hurdle. In the world of retail politics, it’s still getting people to show up at events to at least hear your pitch. If you’re in one of the early primary states and you see a flyer that says Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis or Tim Scott is coming to your town for a little get-together, curious people will show up to attend. If you see the same flyer with Vivek Ramaswamy on it, that’s like me saying Tim in Moorpark is going to give a speech on his campaign. And for those of you long-time Hugh Hewitt Show listeners, when I first began producing in 1995 for a Los Angeles-based local Christian host, five years before launching the national show with Hugh, I ran into a guy wearing a sandwich sign standing on a corner in Bellflower, California at a used car lot where we were originating a remote broadcast. His name was Tim from Moorpark, and he had filed papers to run for president, governor, congress, senate, and mayor, I think. He was shutout. But that didn’t deter him. He ran again. And every time he filed, every two years for whatever seat was available, he made sure to call us and try to get support for his campaign. The last time I heard from Tim was in 2021. He’s been running non-stop for anything for a quarter-century. Nice enough guy, but to paraphrase a great line out of City Slickers, if delusions were people, Tim would be China. Long story, but what Ramaswamy will have to fight with early primary voters is that he really thinks he’s got a shot and he’s not being delusional. And that’s going to take a lot of time on the stump and working small rooms. And once the field starts getting more and more crowded, he may find it hard to reach the ears and wallets he’ll need to reach in order to achieve critical mass.

More columns in the future as you and I both know the field will certainly get larger before it whittles down to the final two. We’ll be there whenever and for whomever decides to throw in their hat.