CINCINNATI — Vivek Ramaswamy didn’t mention the racist taunts that follow him online or the GOP primary opponent who said he’s not a real American. But the Ohio gubernatorial candidate who clinched his party’s nomination this week alluded to bigotry on the right in his opening message to a town hall full of young Republicans.
Ramaswamy, a Hindu son of Indian immigrants, warned the crowd against adopting the same “victim” mentality that he said had afflicted the left. “The number one factor that determines whether you achieve your goals in life … is actually you,” he said at the May 1 event.
“It’s not the Jews,” Ramaswamy added. “It’s not the White people. It’s not the patriarchy. It’s not the Black people. It’s not the foreigners.”
It was a striking message from a candidate who has long cast racism as an obsession of Democrats and has more recently confronted it on the right. After building his political career denouncing “wokeness” on the left, at one point dismissing “the myth of white supremacy” during his 2024 presidential campaign, he is trying to steer his party away from the extremist fringes that have flared up in his own race.
Ramaswamy, 40, won the GOP nomination easily Tuesday, but an obscure primary opponent, Casey Putsch, secured about 18 percent of the vote while assailing “third worlders,” invoking “blood and soil” language used by Nazis and attacking Ramaswamy as an “Indian boy [who] cosplays an American.” Many Republicans dismiss people like Putsch as online agitators who are best ignored — but some are still unnerved by the traction they have gotten despite their embrace of open bigotry.
The ugliness has made the Ohio governor’s race one front in a broader GOP debate over extremism and what to do about it, stoked by the rise of white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes and other like-minded commentators. Some Republicans want to draw a harder line against them and the racial resentments that others on the right have stoked to win elections and cultural influence.
In an op-ed late last year in the New York Times, Ramaswamy raised alarms about the rise of “groypers” in Fuentes’s mold, lamenting “real reluctance from my former anti-woke peers to criticize the new identity politics on the right.”
But many Republicans are also wary of giving any attention to the right’s most extreme figures.
“These people live off of the oxygen that we give them,” said Alex Triantafilou, the chair of the Ohio Republican Party.
Similar tensions are playing out in other races — most notably in Florida, where GOP gubernatorial candidate James Fishback calls his Black opponent, Rep. Byron Donalds (R), “By’rone” and recently told a Black critic that he should be lynched. Fishback is stuck in the single digits in public polling but has still seized attention with his ability to draw an enthusiastic young crowd.
Ramaswamy’s opponents on the right say they aren’t going away. Putsch cast his showing on Tuesday as a victory, noting that his campaign raised about $120,000 — far less than Ramaswamy’s — and lacked the institutional support of the GOP and President Donald Trump, who endorsed Ramaswamy early,
“It really doesn’t matter if we’re fringe,” said Joel Webbon, a Christian nationalist pastor with more than 100,000 followers on X who joined Putsch in Ohio this past weekend for a conference where speakers railed against “Jewish influence” and “third world” immigration. Putsch, he said, “doesn’t have to win in order to prove the legitimacy of our movement.”
He suggested that movement could withhold support for Ramaswamy in November and send a warning to the GOP.
“The squeaky wheel actually has a lot of power,” Webbon said.
A right-wing feud over who belongs in the GOP tent erupted last year when Tucker Carlson, the prominent ex-Fox News host, brought Fuentes on his show for a friendly interview. It intensified when the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation gave a vehement defense of Carlson, prompting others in the GOP to urge the party to denounce Fuentes and his allies.
Many GOP politicians tried to stay out of the fighting, but Ramaswamy jumped in. At a conference last year for the conservative youth group Turning Point USA, he used his speech to draw a hard line.
“If you believe in normalizing hatred towards any ethnic group — toward Whites, toward Blacks, towards Hispanics, towards Jews, towards Indians, you have no place in the future of the conservative movement,” he declared. “If you believe that Hitler was pretty f—ing cool” — as Fuentes had said — “you have no place in the future of the conservative movement.”
He also took aim at the idea of “heritage Americans” that he saw gaining traction in corners of the right — the belief that people with long U.S. ancestry have greater claim to the country, which Ramaswamy called “as loony as anything the woke left has put up.”
In his New York Times op-ed published the same week, he said his social media feeds were littered with slurs and demands that he return to India despite being born in Cincinnati. Soon, he said he was quitting Instagram and X, though his team would keep posting for him.
The racism he had seen online, he said at the time, was unrepresentative of real life; he said he had not heard “a single bigoted remark” from the voters he met over a year touring Ohio. But the ugliness would continue to flare up in his own campaign.
Ramaswamy’s team declined to make him available for an interview.
Putsch billed himself as a “true American” alternative to Ramaswamy, launching a long-shot campaign that personified the issues Ramaswamy had raised at the Turning Point conference. He embraced followers of Fuentes; he shared a mocking depiction of Ramaswamy as a blue Hindu deity; he posted a gun-wielding video in which he asked Ramaswamy if he wanted to play “Cowboy versus Indians.”
“Bad painter,” he said when an independent journalist asked him to say something negative about Hitler.
He was obscure enough for Republican officials to dismiss him as a nonfactor in the race. Fuentes himself — who has urged his followers to back Democrats over many Republicans he dislikes, including Ramaswamy — said he didn’t think Putsch could win. But the racing driver has more than 350,000 YouTube subscribers as “Casey the Car Guy,” and his presence served as a reminder of the Fuentes-style fringe.
“I genuinely don’t know anybody that is a Nick Fuentes follower,” said Aaron Baer, the president of a Christian conservative group in Ohio who endorsed Ramaswamy. But his ideas, Baer added, are “a cancer [that] needs to be addressed.”
Ramaswamy’s supporters started lining up more than an hour early for his town hall at an American Legion post in Cincinnati last week. By the time he took the stage in front of the slogan “Lower costs. Bigger paychecks,” it was standing room only.
People asked about property taxes, crime and health care. Then, as the town hall drew to close, a man asked why he should support a non-Christian.
“I appreciate the question,” Ramaswamy said.
He asked the man to list the Ten Commandments. When the questioner couldn’t, Ramaswamy accurately named them and said he shared the values, to applause.
“This is my St. X education here,” Ramaswamy said, a shout-out to his Catholic high school in Cincinnati.
Landon Thompson, a 19-year-old Putsch fan, sat in the back of the town hall after traveling from northern Kentucky with his father. He didn’t like Ramaswamy’s viral X postlamenting that “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence” and suggesting there was a legitimate reason tech companies often hired foreign-born engineers. And he suggested Ramaswamy had not “integrated” into the U.S. because he was Hindu.
“People … who want to bring even more Indians into this country, it’s just completely shameful,” said Thompson, an outlier in a room packed with Ramaswamy fans.
The next day, an eclectic group of long-shot candidates and influencers from around the country gathered at a mansion outside of Columbus for an “America First” conference — a showcase of the online fringe that Ramaswamy had denounced. Webbon called for “race realism” and a “pro-White” America. Followers of Fuentes mingled, one of them wearing a blue groyper hat bearing the influencer’s initials. Speakers went beyond criticism of Israel to explicitly denounce the influence of Jewish people in the U.S.
“Another f—ing Indian,” a woman said when someone mentioned FBI Director Kash Patel.
Putsch addressed the group of several dozen in a small, ornate room, predicting Ohio voters would “burn Vivek’s campaign to the ground” if he advanced to the general election.
In an interview, he said he couldn’t speak for everyone’s comments at the event but called the participants “good people.” Asked why he mocks Ramaswamy’s ethnicity and religion, Putsch said he is being “funny.”
Putsch has attracted supporters such as Ron Eckles, a 77-year-old Republican who attended another event. He said he questions Ramaswamy’s “loyalty” to the U.S. and has been “wrestling” with whether he will support Ramaswamy in the general election.
But outside Putsch’s events, most of the dozens of conservative voters The Post interviewed out shopping said they had not heard of him. When they had, they often appeared unaware of his most incendiary comments.
At a Kroger about an hour north of Columbus, Republican Tammy Dannemiller said unprompted that she liked that Ramaswamy was not the typical White candidate.
“We do have a really nice diverse population, especially in Columbus,” Dannemiller, 56, said. “It’d be good.”
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