The decline of Vivek Ramaswamy

The entrepreneur has struggled to find a lane to run in

Vivek Ramaswamy, the pharmaceuticals entrepreneur running for the Republican Party (at least for now) nomination for president, announced in a long post on Twitter/X this morning that he will not attend the next primary debate hosted by CNN on January 10th, to be held at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. He claimed the network had engaged in “shenanigans” throughout the campaign and that the debate would be “fake.”

The real reason for Ramaswamy’s boycott may be less a profound disagreement with the network’s coverage of him (Ramaswamy previously appeared on an exclusive town hall with CNN), and more damage control. This afternoon (after the candidate’s Twitter rant) CNN announced that Ramaswamy had failed to reach its pre-determined criteria for appearance at the debate:

Candidates must receive at least 10% in three separate national and/or Iowa polls of Republican caucusgoers or primary voters that meet CNN’s standards for reporting, according to the network. One of the three polls must be an approved CNN poll of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers.

Indeed, Ramaswamy has not hit ten percent in a national poll for months. I imagine he would disagree with this threshold now, given it excluded him, but honestly 10 percent support does not seem like that much to ask before platforming a candidate. Parties in other countries have much higher thresholds (and more burdensome procedures) for determining who is eligible to run for party nominations. The UK’s Conservative Party in 2019, for example, required candidates to have the support of eight Members of Parliament to be nominated, then the support of at least 5% of the Parliamentary Conservative Party in the first ballot, and 10% in the second ballot in order to proceed further. It’s doubtful whether any candidate other than Trump would pass those thresholds in the GOP today.

At any rate, the key question here is how a candidate who briefly threatened to overtake Ron DeSantis in the polls now finds himself in third or fourth place, incapable of meeting even basic qualification standards for debates. Ramaswamy is polling in just the low single digits in Iowa and other early states, meaning he will emerge from the January-March primaries with just a few dozen delegates at best. The arc of his campaign, mimicking Ron DeSantis’s, has been a quick rise in speculative support followed by a drawn-out downward slope. In other words: a crash and burn.

I think the decline in his topline support boils down to two simple explanations:

1. Republican voters got to know Ramaswamy and they didn’t like him. Among Republicans, Ramaswamy’s net favorability rating has declined notably since September, after rising steadily in the summer. He peaked at +36 in mid-September, according to 538’s average, and has declined since the second debate to a current net rating of +13. Compare that to Trump (+57) or DeSantis (+37) and Ramaswamy’s weakness is apparent. While it’s hard to establish causality, we do know that the entrepreneur’s favorability declined among people who reported watching the debate, per 538/Washington Post/Ipsos polling.

2. Ramaswamy simply does not have a clear constituency. He has pitched himself almost exclusively as a younger Trump, embracing most of the same conspiracy theories and positions on social policy as the former president. After the first debate, the candidate has embraced what he calls the Ten Commandments of his 2024 campaign, stylized thereafter as his “hard truths”:

In 2012, these “hard truths” would have placed Ramaswamy to the right of most other Republican candidates But in 2024, this degree of vague social conservatism is matched by almost every other candidate, including the front-runner. He simply cannot out-compete the party’s standard bearer on today’s left-right liberalism/conservatism scale.

His campaign evidently eventually learned this, and has recently leaned into a call for a “new generation of leadership” in the Republican Party. He is the youngest candidate on stage, after all, and voters are growing tired with old politician. However, a candidate’s age does not exist in a vacuum. This tactic by Ramaswamy failed to catch on as most Republican voters prioritize ideology and other factors over age; A NBC News poll last summer found that the most important thing to voters is that candidates share their ideological priorities. Ideology was even more important, they said, than electability.

Without the ability to out-flank his competition on “conservatism” and age, Ramaswamy has found little left to leverage. In the parlance of primary handicapping, he has not found a “lane” to run in. So hopeless is his campaign in this regard that even if Trump dropped out, polls show his support would flow to other candidates — namely Ron DeSantis — over him.

This is not exactly news, but the puzzling thing about Ramaswamy is that has not particularly seemed to care, given the lack of creativity by his campaign.¹ I imagine this is why critics have alleged he’s running to host a podcast instead of to be President of the United States. And given his poll numbers less than two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, that’s likely where he’ll end up.

Nevertheless, Ramaswamy appears determined to make it to Iowa, and maybe compete in New Hampshire and beyond, too. But lighting money on fire is not an effective campaign strategy (and his campaign has stopped spending on TV, signaling he has relatively little of it). He is currently floundering without a key constituency — both in the early states and elsewhere — and despite spending the last month touring every county in Iowa² he has only continued to slide in the polls.

So, why did Vivek Ramaswamy tweet that he wouldn’t attend the CNN debate this morning? For one thing, because he knew hew wouldn’t make it. But here’s another hypothesis: Perhaps he knew it wouldn’t make a difference anyway.

1. To be fair, there is little you can do when your lead rival is ahead of the second-place candidate by nearly 50 points

2. This is one place Ramaswamy deserves some credit; it actually is quite hard to fill venue after venue with supporters day after day