For the past month, many Ohio voters have likely been scratching their heads over why they are seeing TV ads touting Vivek Ramaswamy’s candidacy for Ohio governor 14 months before a single Ohioan casts a 2026 primary ballot and 20 months before the 2026 general election.
It's a good question.
Here’s the answer:
The ads — all $2.2 million’s worth of them — are not meant to persuade you, dear voter.
The ads, hammering away with the voice, image and X post of Donald Trump endorsing Ramaswamy for governor, have a targeted audience of one — maybe two.
The audience would be Dave Yost, Ohio's attorney general who is an announced candidate for governor; and, possibly, Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel, who could also decide to run for the job.
The message to Yost and Tressel is simple: Stay out of the way. I’ve got Trump on my side.
Ramaswamy is a failed 2024 Republican presidential candidate who endorsed Trump for president the day after his own campaign crashed and burned in the January 2024 Iowa caucuses. Ramaswamy, a near-billionaire, was briefly a part of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” before trying and failing to convince Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to appoint him to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by now-Vice President JD Vance. (That went to Jon Husted.)
The St. Xavier High School graduate hadn’t shown much interest in his home state’s politics until that rejection. Suddenly, he decided he was meant to be Ohio’s 65th governor.
And here we are.
His Super PAC, known as “V-PAC: Victors Not Victims,” dropped its $2.2 million ad buy on March 10th in four Ohio media markets — Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, and Zanesville, which covers eastern and much of southeastern Ohio.
It’s highly likely that most Ohio voters are not exactly laser-focused on the 2026 election right now, particularly given the fire hose of news coming out of the White House on a daily basis and the threat of a recession on the horizon.
Doesn’t matter to V-PAC.
The secondary audiences for Ramaswamy’s message are the elected officials in the Statehouse and the Ohio GOP donor class.
David Niven, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati, says the primary audience for the V-PAC ads is “primarily Republican men between the ages of 68-72 who are thinking about running for governor.”
In other words, Yost and Tressel.
“But I wouldn't discount the value of the ads in affecting all those Republican officials — from statewide office all the way down to township trustees — who might consider endorsing in the race based on personal relationships or experience,” Niven said. “This is a warning to all of them that to endorse anyone but Ramaswamy is to immediately ostracize yourself from today's Republican Party.”
And it seems to be working.
Since the ads began running, Ramaswamy has picked up the endorsement of 15 Republican members of the Ohio Senate, including Senate President Rob McColley. U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno is also on board.
Ohio’s Secretary of State, Frank LaRose — who is term-limited out and running for state auditor next year — was positively gleeful about Ramaswamy’s candidacy and tagged along on Ramaswamy’s announcement tour of Ohio.
A super PAC supporting Yost — the Buckeye Freedom Fund — clearly can’t do multi-million-dollar TV ad campaigns the way V-PAC can, but they are fighting back with mail pieces and Facebook ads telling GOP voters that Ramaswamy is too “liberal” on transgender issues.
The Yost campaign gave WVXU a written statement making the argument that Ramaswamy is out of touch with Ohio.
“It’s not surprising that Mr. Ramaswamy feels the need to introduce himself to Ohioans so early,” said Yost campaign spokeswoman Amy Natoce. “Between moving his business to Texas, working in D.C., and jet-setting across the country, he’s barely spent any time in the state he hopes to lead.”
But money talks. And V-PAC has a seemingly unlimited pool of it. The $2.2 million ad campaign wrapped up Monday, but there is likely more to come.
Still, Ohio Republicans who would rather have Yost, Tressel or someone else not named Ramaswamy still have one thing going for them — the possibility of Vivek Ramaswamy being too extreme for mainstream GOP voters.
That became plain during Ramaswamy’s ill-fated run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2023.
Ramaswamy began campaigning to win voters in the Iowa caucuses in April of that year.
The polling in Iowa made it clear — the longer his campaign went on and the more millions he spent, the faster his approval rating tanked. And, in January 2024, he finished fourth in the caucuses with a shade under 8% of the vote.
In his one and only time on a ballot, the more voters got to know him, the less they liked him.
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