While Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy may be lagging in the polls, in his first month on the campaign trail no one has outworked the Ohio businessman to connect with voters.
In the words of Geoff Mack and Johnny Cash, Ramaswamy has been everywhere, man from Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina and Maryland. He’s made the media rounds, too, from the smallest small town newspapers to the network talking heads.
At 37, Ramaswamy is by far the youngest candidate in the field of declared and prospective GOP candidates for the White House – and his youthful energy is showing.
This weekend, the political outsider covered sparsely populated areas of corn- and cattle-rich western Iowa. Turnout was solid and the welcome enthusiastic at a Mills County Republican Committee town hall in Glenwood Friday evening and at several stops along the way during Ramaswamy’s three-day, three-county tour.
Part of the friendly reception, as always, was just part of Iowa Nice, what presidential candidates have come to expect and respect from-the-first-in-the-nation caucus state since the early 1970s. What the Democratic National Committee is abandoning in 2024 in its quest for “diversity and inclusion.”
But Ramaswamy’s conservative message about getting to the bottom of what exceptional America really is and why that really matters seems to be resonating with many — from Des Moines to Denison, Davenport to Pottawattamie County.
“We’re in the middle of this national identity crisis, where if you ask most people my age, really any age, what does it mean to be an American today? you get a blank stare in response. And I think that is the vacuum at the heart of our national soul,” he told CNN earlier this month.
His weekend campaign swing marked the candidate’s second trip to Iowa in just over a month on the trail. On Saturday, Ramaswamy met with Iowans at a Limousin cattle farm in Pottawattamie County, followed by a trip to Treynor (population 1,032) for an absentee ballot training session with local Republicans at the community center. He looked at ease discussing politics and rural life, with his young son in his arms.
His first trip to Iowa, rough Midwest winter weather forced Ramaswamy to travel without his family, making him miss his son Karthik’s 3rd birthday. Karthik made the trip west with dad this time. The entrepreneur and best-selling author, who has made a fortune on making lucrative bets in venture capital and the biopharmaceutical arenas, has suggested he and his family will become quite familiar with the Hawkeye State over the next 10 month’s leading up to the 2024 Iowa caucuses.
Ramaswamy, like his GOP nomination rivals, is learning Iowa Nice also comes with a healthy helping of direct questions.
At a meet and greet with the candidate Saturday afternoon sponsored by the Crawford County Republican Women, attendees listened intently to Ramaswamy’s stump speech. But they also had plenty of questions for a presidential contestant declared a ‘long-shot” candidate in a field that includes former President Donald Trump and, most likely, popular Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Ramaswamy, so far, hasn’t been afraid to take tough questions. He seems to get that his best shot at the White House is through the retail politics that political testing grounds Iowa and New Hampshire richly provide.
While Trump packed thousands into his outdoor rally in Waco, TX over the weekend and DeSantis has been drawing big crowds on his book tour, Ramaswamy looks to move his message out through myriad media channels and by coming early and often to the states that could improve the odds on his “long-shot” campaign.
“Iowans are hungry for an outsider again, but understand the importance of moral authority in a leader — Vivek is that leader,” campaign spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Iowa Star.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
