With DeSantis in decline, Vivek Ramaswamy makes a run at a new ‘two-man race’
Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign has tried to cling to the notion that the fight for the Republican nomination remains a two-man race.
But with his campaign shrinking in size and falling further behind GOP front-runner Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy is moving expeditiously to stamp out that impression for good.
The 37-year-old biotech investor is starting to make an argument similar to that of the Florida governor: The GOP nomination is a two-man race, he agrees. But it’s he who is emerging as the No. 2 candidate to the former president, as DeSantis’ two-month old campaign struggles to find its footing.
“I think functionally I am in second place,” Ramaswamy told McClatchy in an interview. “I’m in second place by a wide margin in the metric that matters.”
That metric is earned media attention, which has been propelled by Ramaswamy’s omnipresent interview strategy of talking to a wide range of outlets and audiences.
According to a Cision Analytics tracking document provided by the campaign, Ramaswamy was second only to Trump in earned media hits over a 45-day period that covered June and July.
Ramaswamy logged 58,918 media hits compared to Trump’s 100,577, per Cision. DeSantis was in third with 38,131. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott lagged far behind with just 4,375 hits.
Earned media is defined as the amount of coverage a candidate receives for free, without having to pay for advertising. In a presidential race, it’s often seen as more valuable than paid media due to the suspicion voters have of political ads.
“Earned media is so much more valuable than paid media,” said David Sacks, a fundraiser for DeSantis during a recent podcast with Ramaswamy. “Vivek is living off the land. It’s earned media. Trump did the same thing in 2016.”
According to campaign CEO Ben Yoho, Ramaswamy also surpassed DeSantis in search traffic for a period last week.
“I’d look at that as a leading indicator that he’s now competing at the level of Ron DeSantis when you talk about the day trading of attention of voters,” said Ben Yoho, Ramaswamy’s campaign chief.
The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Ramaswamy frames his trajectory as comparable to Trump’s original ascent in the summer of 2015, when he wasn’t spending money on advertising but dominated the political conversation.
“If you look at … ad dollars per poll number, it’s not even close. That’s the metric that actually matters,” Ramaswamy said. “I think that the other candidates are going to be on the ground floor, where Trump and I are the only ones who are really dominating that metric. So I do think it’s a two-man race, I think it’s very quickly going to be evident that it’s a two-man race.”
According to AdImpact, a political advertising tracker, the super PAC of Scott is the largest spender in the GOP primary to date, followed by Trump and DeSantis. Even Nikki Haley and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum have spent more than Ramaswamy so far, though Ramaswamy is the third biggest digital spender in the Republican field, according to data compiled by FWIW, another tracking firm.
And yet Ramaswamy is seeing positive polling movement for a candidate who was virtually unknown when he announced nearly six months ago.
A new Morning Consult national survey of Republican primary voters shows Ramaswamy ticking up to 8%, good enough for third place. That puts him 8 points behind DeSantis and a whopping 51 points behind Trump. Last week, a separate survey found Ramswamy tied for third place nationally at 12%.
Still, in the early states that ultimately decide the nominee, Ramaswamy has work to do. A Fox Business poll measured him in fourth place in Iowa, pacing 5 points behind Scott.
While Ramaswamy praised DeSantis as a good governor in the interview, he described him as an implementer who duplicated existing ideas and hinted that he’s making the same mistakes former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker made during his unsuccessful 2016 campaign that collapsed after just two months.
“Voters don’t want to hear about a governor droning on about his accomplishments without a vision for what we’re actually doing as a country. And I’m talking about 2015-2016 here. But I think that’s one of the lessons that will be applicable this time around as well,” Ramaswamy said.
“He’s an effective executor,” Ramaswamy said of DeSantis. “Take Kristi Noem’s vision in South Dakota, that she started with. He took that and applied it in Florida. I’m grateful that he read Woke Inc., the book that I wrote, took that and implemented that, much of that vision in Florida.”
Ramaswamy hasn’t generally painted a contrast with his GOP primary rivals and his opponents have largely ignored him.
But Ramswamy’s campaign expects that to change once the first Republican debate is held in late August.
“I will confront anybody on a debate stage, from Don Lemon to Chuck Todd, to Donald Trump to Ron DeSantis, it doesn’t matter,” Ramaswamy said. “We have a talk-to-everyone strategy. I do not hide from open debate.”
