To call Ohio a locked-in party town for the GOP would be something of an understatement. Unlike the rest of the Rust Belt, Ohio has slowly come under firm, if not unbreakable, Republican control.
From 1991 to 2025, Ohio has only seen a single Democrat win a single term as governor (and only after a very bizarre scandal involving public money invested in a gold coin scam). The last 14 years have featured the final, slow bleedout of Democrats from any element of public control. There is not a single statewide partisan office with a Democrat incumbent. Both the House and Senate have GOP supermajorities. The state Supreme Court is 6-1 in favor of the GOP. When Mike DeWine won reelection in 2022, he did so by 25-plus points and didn’t even bother to debate his Democrat opponent.
There is plenty of reason to openly question what benefit this level of control has had for Ohioans. The strategic use of this power has been limited by a local GOP riven by infighting and factionalism and a popular but firmly centrist governor unwilling to pick decisive fights in the twilight of his political career. One would expect substantive critiques and a new vision as the race begins to replace the term-limited DeWine as the GOP nominee. Yet, when I tuned in to watch Vivek Ramaswamy’s long-awaited announcement of his run for governor, I was struck by how little substance he offered.
After a lovely Ohio civics lesson on our industrial age greatness, Vivek launched into the techno futurist vision for Ohio’s industrial redevelopment that is familiar to anyone who has paid attention to local economic fortunes. The Intel semiconductor fabrication facility in Franklin County has long been at the root of a sparkling promised future for the whole state and has led to a considerable sum of federal funding for major infrastructure, from rail expansions to new interstate bridges.
Yet the rest of Vivek’s speech seemed to be absent any knowledge of anything the state has done to realize this future. He treated the GOP dominance of Ohio with a wave of the hand and the phrase, “Some things have been moving in the right direction,” before launching into a list of campaign promises centered on one idea: making Ohio “the new Silicon Valley.”
In the run-up to this announcement, Vivek has treated Ohio like a failed state in need of his expert ministrations to “save.” His announcement featured ruminations about work ethic, paired with repeated promises to turn Ohio into the Santa Clara of the Midwest. His constant fetishization of Silicon Valley betrays his belief that it is an aspirational end goal, rather than a potential cautionary tale of a community riven by such cost-of-living issues that the people who work there can’t afford to live there.
He leaves no space for those of us who don’t want Ohio communities to be so fundamentally altered. I’m on the record saying Vivek’s main problem is that he isn’t from here, a designation born not of his cultural heritage but of his status as a fantastically wealthy technocratic hyper-elite. To him, Ohio and its residents appear to be nothing more than interchangeable economic units to be optimized to create ever higher output numbers. Nothing epitomizes that more than his vapid promise to turn the state into a technology hub that will price out the people who already live here.
The combination of Vivek’s ability to spend an infinite amount of money and the backing of the president may make resistance to him taking the GOP nomination for governor a somewhat meaningless exercise. Trump is legitimately popular here, and Ohio may be the sole example of a Rust Belt state that firmly slid into reliable red territory for national elections thanks to him. Vivek correctly sees an opportunity to use his name ID, strong charisma, personal fortune, and direct backing of Trump, who very quickly endorsed him, to stake a claim. Vivek’s fortune is unlike anything we have seen in someone running for governor, and no amount of fundraising Attorney General Dave Yost does will hold a candle to what Vivek can bring to bear just from his own pockets.
If you think the local Democrats are looking to create a compelling counterargument with their own nominees, think again. The Ohio Democrat Party is seriously contemplating nominating one of the state’s most hated figures, Covid-19 lockdown aficionado Amy Acton. One might wonder why the Democrats don’t seem interested in running out someone who can make it competitive, but after the relatively accomplished former Mayor of Dayton Nan Whaley got rolled 63-37 in 2022 with minimal effort, it seems likely no one on the Democrat bench sees the race as particularly winnable, especially against Vivek.
The end of Vivek’s speech, given in one of the suburban counties outside Cincinnati, included your usual cadre of feel-good moments. From his old barber, to his piano teacher, to even one of the teachers from St. Xavier High School where Vivek was my classmate 25 years ago, there was no shortage of people ready to say how smart, talented, and capable Vivek is. Promises were made about visiting every county, and there was plenty of political stump speech pablum sprinkled through the affair. Vivek is practiced at this due to his national run, and the polished nature of his remarks was undeniable.
Despite all of this, I came away from the announcement still wondering what it is Vivek stands for or represents. His campaign slogans are empty, his promises already things that exist, and his raison d’etre nonexistent aside from “the race seems easy to win.” Nothing I saw changed my mind about the assessment I made about him before: You cannot trust the homeless elite to care about the interests of the native population.
Whether it is Vivek in Ohio or his neoliberal doppelganger Pete Buttigieg in Michigan, the danger lies in losing your identity, as a place and people, to technocrats who do not care about what came before them.