Why Are Republicans Falling Out of Love With Vivek?

By Ed Kilgore, political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015

Until recently, there was a pretty clear template for Republican presidential candidates who became very unpopular among Republican voters: They were perceived as enemies of Donald Trump. A June Marist Poll of Republicans and leaners showed just three GOP candidates with meh-to-bad favorable/unfavorable ratios: Chris Christie (22 percent/50 percent), Asa Hutchinson (9 percent/23 percent), and Mike Pence (45 percent/41 percent). The first two were overtly anti-Trump candidates, and the third was the former vice-president thought in MAGA-land to have betrayed the Boss on January 6.

Since then, Pence has dropped out; Hutchinson has become invisible; and Christie stands alone as a loud-and-proud Never Trump candidate soaking up the love of the small Never Trump faction of Republican voters. But there is now another candidate beginning to see some serious signs of unpopularity with the party base, and it’s not someone thought of at all as a Trump enemy. It’s in fact Trump mini-me Vivek Ramaswamy.

The growing unlikability of the tech tyro is evident in polls from two early states that have seen a lot of the candidates. In Iowa, the authoritative Iowa Poll from Ann Selzer shows Ramaswamy’s favorability ratio deteriorating from 38 percent/20 percent in August to 43 percent/37 percent in October. To know him better is not to love him more, it seems. And putting the matter a slightly different way, a new CNN survey of South Carolina shows 60 percent of likely primary voters have ruled out considering Ramaswamy, not far from the 71 percent who wouldn’t think of voting for Christie (or the 62 percent who said hell no to Pence before he dropped out).

You have to figure that at least some of the Vivekphobia in South Carolina stems from the verbal fisticuffs he had with the Palmetto State’s own Nikki Haley in the first candidate debate, an adversarial relationship that flared up again over dueling remarks on the Israel-Hamas war, as Fox News reported:

 Vivek Ramswamy says that 2024 Republican presidential nomination rival Nikki Haley should be “disqualified from being president.”

The multi-millionaire biotech entrepreneur and first-time candidate’s verbal attack on Haley, a former two-term South Carolina governor who later served as ambassador to the United Nations in then-President Donald Trump’s administration, came hours after she argued that Ramaswamy’s comments on the Israel-Hamas war were akin to the far-left “Squad” in Congress …

Ramaswamy, speaking with reporters ahead of his speech at the New Hampshire GOP’s First-in-the-Nation Leadership Summit, accused Haley of having “personal conflicts of interest,” which appeared to be a jab at her husband’s business ties to the defense industry.

“Nikki Haley has foreign policy experience, and it shows — in her bank account, to the tune of $8 million,” Ramaswamy said. “It is sick. Especially when you have a Biden crime family and the White House that has monetized their connections and their foreign policy and sold off our foreign policy. We don’t need to substitute them with a Republican version of the same.” 

Yikes. Comparing a fast-rising rival’s family to the Bidens represents fighting words among Republicans.

It’s not just Haley that Ramaswamy is insulting, though. Recall what he said in the first candidate debate:

Political outsider Vivek Ramaswamy turned heads at the Fox News debate Wednesday during a discussion whether human behavior creates climate change.

“I’m the only person on this stage who isn’t bought and paid for,” Ramaswamy declared.

The debate audience, which had initially been cheering Ramaswamy, promptly booed. It was a microcosm of how perceptions of him on the campaign trail seem to have evolved. He initially came across as brash, refreshing, and interesting — a welcome addition to a field of tedious pols trying to behave more responsibly than Trump. But over time, he talked and talked and morphed into an arrogant know-it-all offering off-the-cuff policy prescriptions that showed he didn’t actually know that much at all — i.e., his infamous “plan” to sell out Ukraine in exchange for Russia breaking ties with China (I called it at the time “something an Adderall-fueled college student might come up with while playing Risk in a dorm room late at night”).

Apparently, being a self-important blowhard doesn’t go over terribly well, particularly coming from a 38-year-old whippersnapper. To put it another way, just because Donald Trump gets away regularly with bad behavior, it’s not an act his imitators can pull off.

Add in the ire of supporters of the other candidates in the race, and you can see why Ramaswamy has turned off a big chunk of the primary electorate after drawing favorable first impressions.

None of this will likely keep Ramaswamy from his trajectory toward a Cabinet post or an ambassadorship in a second Trump administration, if there is one — or perhaps a run for statewide office in Ohio if Trump doesn’t win. His fans will likely write off his 2024 foibles as youthful indiscretions. But it’s instructive to know that even in today’s Republican Party, personality counts.