Ramaswamy’s campaign is approaching Ohio’s May 5 Republican governor primary with a near-general-election posture, even as the race forces party voters to weigh whether he can secure their support for November against Democrat Amy Acton, Ohio’s former public health director. In an Associated Press report, the contest is described as having few signs that the leading candidate sees the GOP primary as competitive, even with recent signals of friction within parts of the Republican base.
The campaign has leaned heavily on Ramaswamy’s national name recognition, tech industry connections, and alliance with President Donald Trump, a strategy that has helped produce what the AP report described as a record fundraising haul that Ramaswamy’s campaign is deploying for advertising aimed at the general election. While his campaign’s messaging targets Acton, the AP report says the approach has also included campaign rallies and advertising used to criticize Ramaswamy’s prospective Democratic opponent.
At a recent party fundraising dinner, Ramaswamy told Republicans that “I believe this year we face the single greatest contrast between two candidates in the history of governor’s races in Ohio,” adding, “We face the most consequential election for governor in the history of our state.” The AP report characterizes his camp as increasingly confident in gliding through the May 5 primary, describing the campaign as having largely ignored its GOP opponent so far.
But the primary season, the report says, has exposed vulnerabilities that could complicate that confidence. The headwinds described in the story include discontent within a GOP base tied to cost-of-living pressures, anger over the disjointed release of Jeffrey Epstein files, and concerns that issues such as the demands of data centers and the war with Iran are shaping voters’ preferences. The AP report also says Ramaswamy faces criticism for proposals including consolidating the state’s university system and raising the voting age to 25, with critics describing those ideas as out of step with average Ohioans.
The AP report also says some of the criticism has “veered into the personal,” including ethnic and racial animosity directed at Ramaswamy, described in the story as the child of Indian immigrants. A related concern for Ramaswamy’s supporters, the report adds, is less about Republicans changing sides to vote for a Democrat and more about whether conservative turnout could fall.
Ramaswamy’s political coalition includes figures positioning the primary as having multiple “opponents.” State Senate President Rob McColley, described in the report as Ramaswamy’s running mate, said in remarks shared by WGH Talk that “We have three opponents right now in this race,” naming “Amy Acton,” “the national political environment,” and “complacency.” McColley called the complacency problem the “most dangerous opponent we possibly have.”
The AP report identifies Casey Putsch as a challenger capturing at least some of the anger and curiosity among conservative voters who are not fully aligned with Ramaswamy. Putsch is described as an engineer and vehicle designer who calls himself “The Car Guy,” drawing fans with provocative YouTube videos that troll Ramaswamy and criticize national Republicans over their handling of the Epstein files, their positions on data centers, and support for Israel. The report says Putsch’s events are sparsely attended and his campaign has raised about $123,000, but that he has won some supporters.
One of those supporters, Tyler Morris, told the AP report he sees Putsch as relatable. Morris, an ambulance manufacturing worker from central Ohio, said: “When I hear people like Casey speak, he’s a guy like me,” adding, “He’s just a guy that got pissed off one day. He’s not a politician.” Morris said he had previously supported Trump, but he described becoming sour on him and said he would not back a candidate endorsed by the president, as Ramaswamy is.
The AP report also describes how Putsch’s messaging has extended beyond an effort to argue policy differences, moving into disputes over Ramaswamy’s background. Putsch was accused in the story of contributing to ethnic hatred against Ramaswamy by repeatedly taking issue with the candidate’s Indian heritage and Hindu faith. The report also describes Putsch as saying early in his campaign that Ramaswamy had contempt for “American cultural values,” and in an online video he called for Ramaswamy to “be destroyed.”
In response to that kind of framing, the AP report says a Ramaswamy opinion piece in The New York Times asked Republicans to reject what it described as a far-right, white nationalist element in the party. The report quotes the opinion piece stating, “No matter your ancestry, if you wait your turn and obtain citizenship, you are every bit as American as a Mayflower descendant as long as you subscribe to the creed of the American founding and the culture that was born of it,” and adds that Ramaswamy followed up by rebuking racism and antisemitism within Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest.
After those events, the AP report says Ramaswamy’s social media activity drew increasingly harsh reactions, and it says Putsch also pushed racial epithets in ways described as mocking. The report includes examples such as Putsch depicting Ramaswamy as a stink bug he is spraying with insecticide and challenging him to a game of “cowboys and Indians.” The report also says Ramaswamy announced in January he was getting off Instagram and the social media site X, writing in a Wall Street Journal column that “Leaders who depend on social media to gauge public opinion are looking through a broken mirror.” The AP report says Putsch mocked that decision on X, posting that his rival “can’t take the heat.”
Other party figures and groups in the AP report describe those attacks as typical primary-election behavior or as misguided. Ohio Republican Party chairman Alex Triantafilou dismissed Putsch’s attacks in the story as “typical for a primary election,” saying, “The online right these days, it’s meaningless to the message of where we are as a party on the ground.” Triantafilou pointed to Ramaswamy’s national profile, political skills, and fundraising reach, describing record total contributions of $50 million for the campaign, with roughly half from Ramaswamy’s own fortune.
Aaron Baer, president of the Columbus-based Center for Christian Virtue, also rejected Putsch’s disparagement of Ramaswamy’s background. Baer told the AP report: “The bottom line is Vivek Ramaswamy, while he doesn’t share the Christian faith with me and millions of other Ohioans, he very much shares our values.”
The AP report describes Ramaswamy’s campaign as drawing impressive crowds across Ohio’s 88 counties and frames his strategy as appearing to work with some voters attending events. Pam Koch, a 70-year-old pharmacy worker, told the report she came to see where Ramaswamy stood “spiritually and (on) everything that we value” at a Lincoln Reagan Day dinner where he was the featured speaker. Koch described herself as a “pro-life Christian” and said afterward she was “delighted with what she heard,” adding: “I think he lines up with all of our values, so I’m excited about that.”
Other voters in the report were described as staying with Putsch despite his disadvantages in the primary’s fundraising environment. Ron Eckles, a retired communications worker, told the AP report he is sticking with Putsch partly because he shares some qualities with Ramaswamy, including being a native Ohioan and building his own business, and because he likes that Putsch is an Ohio State University alumnus while Ramaswamy attended Harvard and Yale. Eckles told the report, “I believe in miracles.”