A new challenger has emerged to Trump – and his extreme anti-woke message is working

Vivek Ramaswamy is now a serious player as the Republicans consider who will get their presidential nomination – his rise would have been unthinkable in a pre-Trump world, writes Andrew Feinberg

Vivek Ramasway speaking at an event earlier this month (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

He’s never spent a day in public office. He’s never even run for public office before, and he’s a 37-year-old practicing Hindu who is vying for presidential primary votes from a Republican electorate that is overwhelmingly old, white and Christian.

So why does Vivek Ramaswamy’s unlikely presidential campaign seem to be catching on?

Over the last week, a succession of polls show the former biotech entrepreneur turned anti-woke author and asset manager turned political neophyte garnering support from as much as 10 per cent of GOP primary voters.

On one hand, that’s not much considering the frontrunner, twice-impeached and twice-indicted former president Donald Trump, still holds a lead somewhere in the range of 24 to 43 per cent over his closest rivals.

But most of those same polls show Ramaswamy’s support beating far more well-known and experienced political hands, including a former vice president (Mike Pence), three former governors (Nikki Haley, Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson) and a sitting US senator, Tim Scott.

And one survey of Ohio Republicans, released by Ohio Northern University on Friday, reveals that this complete newcomer to electoral politics has overtaken one of those governors – DeSantis – and is now the second choice of the Buckeye State GOP electorate after the former president.

At an event for all 13 candidates for the Republican nomination in Iowa on Friday, Ramaswamy got one of the biggest standing ovations of the night with a promise of “revolution” instead of reform.

A few short years ago, it would have been unthinkable for someone who’d never before run for office to be making such an impact in a presidential election.

Then a certain New York real estate developer-cum-reality television icon decided to run for president — and won.

So does Ramaswamy’s traction in the Trump-era GOP field mean voters no longer care about experience? Should governors and senators worry that their odds of winning the highest office in the land will always be longer than the odds for some youngster with the money to self-fund?

Not exactly.

What appears to be buoying Ramaswamy is a combination of circumstance, strategy and the candidate’s own political gifts.

The circumstances are well-known and obvious to anyone who has paid much attention to the bizarre state American politics has been in since Trump pulled off his shock defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

While much of the Republican electorate had expressed a preference for one of the myriad rivals who Trump bested on his way to the presidency, one by one those failed candidates fell in line behind him as he turned the party into a grievance-powered engine that was – and is – finely attuned to his whims, moods and preferences.

This most prominent expression of phenomenon can be found when evaluating the GOP’s view towards law enforcement and the US intelligence and defence establishments. Republicans spent decades cultivating an image as the “law and order” party and the guarantor of American national security, both during the Cold War and in the tumultuous years following 9/11.

But under Trump’s leadership, the reverence the GOP rank and file once held for the Department of Justice and the US armed services has evaporated as the ex-president has bristled at criticism from top military and intelligence officials who served under him and criminal charges – with more on the way – from the government he once led.

Ramaswamy has capitalised on this dynamic by embracing a maximally Trumpian attitude towards the US national security apparatus.

He has defended the disgraced ex-president at every turn, even as he hypothetically campaigns to defeat him. He has promised to pardon Trump if he is found guilty by juries of his peers in any of the criminal cases pending against the ex-president, and he has borrowed the GOP frontrunner’s rhetoric about the so-called “deep state” and promised to “dismantle” it by embracing a Trumpian maximalist vision of presidential power.

If elected, he says he’ll completely eliminate the FBI, the agency responsible for the two highest-profile criminal probes into Trump’s conduct, while ridding the Department of Defence of any so-called “woke” officers and other personnel, with an eye towards remaking it in the image of a military that is loyal to the vision for America he and the former president appear to share.

In short, Trump’s grievances have become his grievances, because he knows those grievances have also become the grievances of the rank-and-file GOP voter.

Ramaswamy’s strategy at every turn has been to echo Trump’s false claim to be a victim of a Justice Department that is under the thrall of Democrats and persecuting him to prevent him from regaining his perch atop America’s executive branch.

At times, this has taken on a stunt-ish quality, such as when Ramaswamy showed up to address reporters who’d gathered at a Miami courthouse on the day Trump and his co-defendant, Walt Nauta, were set to be arraigned after he was indicted in early June.

Ramaswamy, a Yale-educated attorney, announced that he was filing a Freedom of Information Act request seeking communications between the White House (which is exempt from such requests) and the DOJ (which isn’t required to produce documents on pending criminal cases) and accused the department of misconduct by echoing Trump’s legally meritless claims about the Presidential Records Act, a post-Watergate law which states that presidential records are the government’s property.

His campaign has also benefited from an aggressive media strategy which has seen him become omnipresent, appearing not only on television networks but on relatively obscure conservative podcasts and in the pages of extremely niche right-wing media outlets.

When our correspondent spent a day on the road with Ramaswamy at the beginning of the summer as he campaigned in New Hampshire, it did not go unnoticed that the candidate travels with a full media team that helps him produce a campaign-linked podcast and keeps a bare-bones studio set-up at the ready to enable him to appear on any programme that will have him at any time.

As a result, a wide swathe of Americans have seen the third factor that has let Ramaswamy stand apart from the field.

Although his policy positions trend towards the Trumpian-authoritarian end of the political spectrum, he speaks about them without the anger and resentment that typifies Trump’s speaking style and he does so in an articulate way that sets him apart from the field in a party that often seems to prefer candidates who speak as if they are uneducated to better appeal to voters who lack university degrees.

Ramaswamy is, to be blunt, an extremely gifted political athlete. He can connect with a small room of New Hampshire voters over breakfast and he can also command the attention of the large crowds that flock to GOP cattle calls such as the Conservative Political Action Conference, the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to the Majority Summit, and the myriad events put on by youth-focused groups such as Turning Point Action.

His message to voters is an extreme one: he promises to rule by decree and eliminate huge chunks of the federal government that have become enemies to conservatives by their insistence on the rule of law, even when it stymied what Trump and his allies wanted during his presidency or performs legitimate law enforcement functions by prosecuting the ex-president.

But he delivers that message with the skill of a communicator the likes of which is more often seen in Democratic circles — think Barack Obama or Pete Buttigieg.

He probably won’t beat Trump, but Ramaswamy is doing his best to make a mark by making himself available and telling voters what they want to hear. Thus far, they seem to like what they see.