Want to be one of the first to read Howard Wilkinson's columns? Sign up for The Daily View newsletter.
Monday night in Cincinnati, the two major party candidates for Ohio governor — Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy — appeared at two very different events.
Acton, the former Ohio Public Health director who became a household name in this state with her daily updates during the COVID pandemic five years ago, was at a private home in Hyde Park, meeting with supporters, many of them young voters.
Ramaswamy was only a few miles away on the University of Cincinnati campus as the featured speaker at an event sponsored by Turning Point Action, part of the late Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA nonprofit organization, where both students and GOP political figures who support Kirk's brand of politics were present.
The UC College Democrats were incensed by the event.
“Ramaswamy is running on a platform rooted in division and hate,” the college Democrats said on their Facebook page. “Turning Point Action offers a platform of extremism for the candidates they endorse.”
In late November, Ramaswamy touched off a firestorm of criticism by posting on social media a video in which he proposed year-round school for K-12 kids in which the school day would end at 4 p.m., arguing that it would somehow cut the costs of childcare. The criticism was swift and brutal — from educators who value their time off and parents who said they would indeed have to pay for childcare after 4 p.m. until they returned home from work.
Ramaswamy backed down immediately, cutting a new campaign issue that did not mention year-round school at all.
WVXU wanted to talk to Ramaswamy about his campaign, but he rarely does media interviews. His campaign spokesperson, Connie Luck, did not respond to our requests.
Acton, though, did talk at length with WVXU.
She was reluctant to talk about Ramaswamy directly, but she did talk about her problems posting anything critical of her opponent on X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk.
“It was said that our posts were taken down for hateful content,” Acton said. “But all we were doing was quoting what he said.”
Ramaswamy, it should be noted, was Musk’s partner in the early days of DOGE, the government cost-cutting program. Federal spending actually grew during the life of DOGE, which has since been shutdown.
Acton, in her first run for elective office, has been touting a poll done for the Ohio Federation of Teachers in early November which gave her a statistically insignificant lead of one percentage point over Ramaswamy.
“This is definitely a neck-and-neck race,” Acton said.
“I think people are longing for someone who wants to make their lives better; they are exhausted by all of this hate and vitriol,” Acton said.
“As I travel around the state, the cost of living is what people are talking about,’’ she said.
“There’s really no culture war going on in this race,” she added. “It’s about pursuing policies that will make people’s lives better.”
It is really rather amazing that Acton is in a dead heat with Ramaswamy at this stage. She has raised about $1.5 million for her campaign; Ramaswamy has close to $10 million.
Acton seems to be beyond the point in her campaign of hearing fellow Democrats tell her they like her, but she can’t win.
She has never been on a ballot before. But her opponent has, just once, and it did not end well.
In 2015, Ramaswamy was one of a large field of candidates campaigning for the presidential nomination in Iowa.
Only 8,449 Iowa Republicans managed to defy the snow-covered highways and the 20-below wind chill to make it to a caucus site in January 2024 to cast their votes for Ramaswamy.
After stumping in all of Iowa's 99 counties — not once, but twice — he earned 7.7% of the vote. Far behind the second and third place finishers, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, respectively; and miles behind Donald Trump, who had over 50% of the caucus vote.
The morning after the caucuses, Ramaswamy suspended his presidential campaign and rushed to New Hampshire, where he pledged his loyalty to Trump in a fiery speech at a Trump campaign rally.
The consensus of the pundits was simple and the numbers bear it out: He failed in Iowa because the more people knew about him, the less the less they liked him.
Read more:
