When Vivek Ramaswamy opened the first GOP presidential primary debate last month, he acknowledged that he does not fit the mold of a traditional Republican presidential candidate. “Let me just address the question that is on everybody’s mind at home tonight,” he said. In a line he lifted from Barack Obama, he continued: “Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name, and what the heck is he doing in the middle of this debate stage?”
Ramaswamy, 38, is an outlier within the ranks of the GOP: He is the son of immigrants, Hindu, brown-skinned, and under 40. He belongs to a demographic that overwhelmingly skews Democratic and is often targeted by Republican policies. Even if Ramaswamy is unlikely to win the nomination, in a few weeks, he has made an impact: He briefly climbed ahead of prominent career politicians, including Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Chris Christie, to third place in the Republican primary polls. He is a near-ubiquitous presence in the media, and, in the aftermath of the first debate, Google registered more than a million searches for “Vivek Ramaswamy” in 24 hours, while Donald Trump dubbed him the debate’s winner. (Ramaswamy has called Trump “the best president of the 21st century.”)
It would be a mistake to dismiss the curious rise of Ramaswamy as a fluke. The multimillionaire venture capitalist is a Trojan horse: He represents a younger, more racially diverse generation, yet espouses the same ultra-conservative, right-wing ideology of 77-year-old Donald Trump, and he embodies the ethos of the “self-made” business mogul that Trump’s base loves. As conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it, “His two personae — as the son of immigrants defending capitalism and meritocracy and the policy entrepreneur promising that you can defeat wokeness by remaking the federal civil rights bureaucracy — indicate the ground where an important part of the right wants to fight its battles.”
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