CINCINNATI — When Vivek Ramaswamy announced his Ohio gubernatorial bid here Monday, the 39-year-old hit nearly every aspect of his biography — so much so that he brought the piano teacher and barber from his childhood on stage to vouch for him.
There was just one omission: His status as former co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, a tenure that lasted just 69 days and ended amid tensions with Elon Musk.
“President Trump is reviving our conviction in America. We require a leader here at home who will revive our conviction in Ohio,” Ramaswamy told supporters in a hulking warehouse just miles from where he grew up. “That is why today I am honored to announce I am running to be the governor of a great state at the heart of the greatest nation known to mankind.”
Ramaswamy’s DOGE omission was telling: His gubernatorial campaign is one of the first to launch in the second Trump administration ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, making it an indicator of what may play well — and what doesn’t — in a former battleground-turned-reliably red state.
And in skipping DOGE, Ramaswamy tacitly acknowledged at least some degree of political peril in the cost-cutting program, particularly in a state like Ohio, home to some 55,000 civilian federal workers, more than in any surrounding state.
“I know it’s going to affect a lot of people,” said Andy Mauser, a 67-year-old retired truck driver who nevertheless supports DOGE’s early work. “It’s going to put a lot of people out of work.”
Ramaswamy may have a more personal motivation for not mentioning his brief tenure atop DOGE. To do so would acknowledge something of a political failure in what is becoming a string of them: Just days before he departed DOGE, Ramaswamy’s allies had said that he wanted to rack up wins in the job to trot out on the campaign trail. Now, Ramaswamy is a politician who has sought three political posts in just more than a year, including the presidency, an appointment to JD Vance’s Senate seat and now, governor.
Asked why he thought Ramaswamy might’ve avoided the topic, Andrew Belcher, a 20-year-old Republican who made the trip from nearby Miami University, acknowledged the potential awkwardness in a state where DOGE’s cuts could prove to be a liability.
“I guess the obvious one is that he’s probably running for governor, but there might have been some personal disagreements between him and Musk,” Belcher said.
DOGE wasn’t entirely absent from Vivek’s launch event, the first of four around the state in a span of hours. Two speakers — Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Sen. Kristina Roegner — scored some of the biggest applause of the event when they namechecked it.
“I’m looking forward to bringing O-DOGE — Ohio DOGE — to our state,” LaRose said.
But railing against “unelected bureaucrats” — a charge some Democrats have actually leveled at Musk — and proposing to cut 10 regulations for every new one mentioned, a project he had hoped to incorporate into DOGE — was the closest Ramaswamy came to addressing the department. Cost cutting might sound good to a Republican audience as he announced his bid, but avoiding it might be the key to his success in November.
Ramaswamy is angling to succeed term-limited Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, a throwback to a more traditionalist version of the GOP. Dave Yost, Ohio’s attorney general and former state auditor, is also running. In interviews, Yost has made an issue of Ramaswamy’s short tenure at DOGE, telling the Washington Post he “quit on President Trump literally on Day 1 of his administration.”
Ramaswamy, though, did not preemptively refute that attack in his opening remarks in the race, instead outlining policy proposals including banning cellphones in schools, and tying himself at the hip to Trump.
Ramaswamy said he spent “most of the last year” returning Trump to power, skipping over his long primary campaign that ended after the Iowa caucuses last January. Like Trump was “reviving our conviction in America,” he said, he would “revive our conviction in Ohio.”
“If I screw something up in this speech, I can’t blame my speechwriter,” Ramaswamy said. “Because you’re looking at him.”
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