There have been only two Democratic governors in Ohio in the last 40 years, and only one since I’ve been an adult. Amy Acton will now be the third. Yes, the national political environment contributed. But Vivek Ramaswamy earned this historic loss all by himself. And he had plenty of people willing to aid and abet him along the way.
What makes this extraordinary is that Ohio Republicans knew better. This is a state that has a history of electing Republicans who are often conservative in policy but moderate and affable in tone. Bombastic politicians not named Donald Trump often don’t play well in this state. Ramaswamy apparently never received that memo.
I began criticizing Vivek publicly during his 2023 presidential campaign over his offensive and bigoted comments about Black Americans, especially Black fathers. One of his senior staffers at the time knew me and asked if I would talk to him. I agreed and invited him to The Outlaws Radio Show, which I co-host. He’d recently gone to Chicago’s South Side, where he spoke with residents. My then-co-host asked what he’d learned. Ramaswamy gave a thoughtful answer about how Americans, regardless of race, largely want the same things. It sounded as though he’d listened.
Then he returned to the campaign trail and continued making the same kinds of offensive comments I objected to in the first place. I watched him do it again in the H-1B debate, this time lecturing Americans about a culture that supposedly prizes jocks over valedictorians. His notorious arrogance and condescension radiated from every syllable of that post. His own words created the well-earned perception of Vivek as an arrogant, entitled jerk.
None of this stopped the Ohio Republican Party from deciding he should be governor. The state party endorsed him in May 2025, almost a year before the primary. Attorney General Dave Yost dropped out the following week. Lt. Governor Jim Tressel, who would have been a formidable opponent, declined to mount a previously expected primary challenge. A primary still occurred, but a meaningful contest among established Republicans never did.
In a year that Ohio Republicans knew would be challenging, one of the worst things they could’ve done was prop up an untested, unproven plutocrat as their standard-bearer. But that’s exactly what they did.
Here’s what I was told by Republican insiders: pressure to lock down that endorsement and discourage challengers came from the highest levels, including all the way to the White House. Vivek announced his gubernatorial run, and President Trump endorsed him immediately. Reports say it was a way to give Ramaswamy a soft landing after clashing with Elon Musk at DOGE.
Some members of the state central committee, according to sources, backed him despite privately opposing the endorsement. Voters may have seen a candidate winning endorsements. Behind the scenes, I’m told, people were being leaned on to make sure he didn’t face a serious challenge. Sources tell me that members of the Trump family were directly involved in the pressure campaign to block any legitimate challenger to Vivek’s candidacy.
What followed in his gubernatorial campaign helps explain why I had always been so critical of him in the first place. A different person—a prominent supporter and friend—contacted me sincerely about my concerns and asked if I would meet with Ramaswamy. I agreed, again. Weeks before the election, I sat in a room with Black community leaders and Black Republican insiders who all pressed him about his rhetoric, his lack of outreach and what he intended to do for Black Ohioans.
He sounded contrite. He asked, “How can I fix it?” I left skeptical but cautiously optimistic that we’d had a productive conversation. And then I saw nothing meaningful happen. I don’t believe he failed to understand what people were telling him. In my view, he didn’t care.
That conclusion became abundantly clear when a Republican Party insider told me that a high-ranking Ramaswamy campaign official openly said they didn’t care about competing for votes in urban counties. They believed that running up the score in the rural parts of the state was all that they needed to do. Wrong. In Cuyahoga County, Ramaswamy had the second-worst performance by a Republican gubernatorial candidate in the county since at least 2002.
Franklin County, home to Columbus, was worse. His performance there was the worst for any Republican gubernatorial candidate in that county since at least 1998. For someone who has a reputation for being a genius, simple math should have told him that it’s stupid to not even attempt to compete in the state’s largest counties.
In contrast, Ohio Secretary of State and next auditor Frank LaRose outperformed Ramaswamy in eight of Ohio’s largest counties, often by five to eight percentage points. LaRose has a history of building positive relationships in urban counties and with Black Ohioans. Apparently, there is still something to be said for actually showing up, building relationships and treating people like their votes matter.
Meanwhile, the public had its own reasons to question Vivek’s judgment. CNN reported in October that his net popularity among Ohio independents was negative 25 points. Then his campaign put Amy Acton’s estranged mother in an ad attacking Acton’s credibility, despite court records supporting Acton’s account of childhood sexual abuse. It was a scumbag move that has been condemned by both Republicans and Democrats alike. And instead of backing off, Ramaswamy committed $4 million to promoting it. That one stupid act reinforced the very negative feelings that many voters had about Vivek to begin with. In their minds, it was confirmation that he was an arrogant, aloof bully who would do anything to get what he wanted.
To be clear, some of the attacks against Ramaswamy were unfair. There were racist attacks against his ethnicity as an Indian man. The problem for him, though, is that he so alienated people of color (including many in his own party) who had enough credibility on racial issues to vociferously push back against those racist attacks that there was no one around to save him when Frankenstein’s monster came knocking at his door.
Politics is ultimately a people-based business. It is unwise to nominate a person who apparently lacks basic people skills, common decency or the ability to comprehend social cues to the highest office of your state. Allowing this neurodivergent narcissist to test the limits of Ohio’s partisan identity was one of the biggest political missteps of the Ohio Republican Party in the last two decades.
Ramaswamy owns this loss. The people who cleared his path aided and abetted it. They can’t say they weren’t warned. Some of us had been saying it for years. The difference is that now Ohio has made the consequences impossible to ignore.
Darvio Morrow is CEO of First Class Broadcasting and co-host of The Outlaws Radio Show