The Debate Did Nothing Except Reveal Vivek Ramaswamy to the World

By Jeffrey Blehar

Monday, August 28, 2023

 

Last Wednesday’s Republican primary debate in Milwaukee — featuring every candidate of note save Donald Trump — was a surprisingly substantive affair despite, indeed perhaps because of, Trump’s absence. Nikki Haley turned in an assertive performance while Tim Scott and Chris Christie withered under the spotlight; meanwhile Ron DeSantis’s strict command of his briefing book and lucky/canny avoidance of the crossfire served him better than I suspected it would at the time, although he has lost a tick of national ground regardless. But otherwise, nothing much seems to have changed in terms of the race’s national dynamics if the polling averages are anything to go by: Donald Trump sits securely in the top position, with well north of 50 percent of the overall primary vote, while the others top out in the teens in terms of devoted support. Nobody seems to have moved to overtake anyone else, at least not yet. (Note: We do not have post-debate surveys of key early-primary states.)

 

But what about the dog that didn’t bark? Something else that I expected to happen in the wake of the Republican debate failed to materialize, and this very much to my delight: a national Vivek Ramaswamy boomlet. As I wrote in my rather sour debate roundup on Wednesday night:

 

Like it or not, the story coming out of tomorrow will be Vivek Ramaswamy. On a personal level, I find his demeanor repellent: an overgrown Martin Prince from The Simpsons, flailing his hand furiously in the air to be noticed, shouting, “Teacher, please call on me! I’m ever so smart!” He is callow, overeager, and unsophisticatedly glib, and he answers every question in the unmistakeably coil-tensed vocal clip of a YouTube–trained motivational speaker. He will also sell to the Republican primary base; I am not the target market. Barely a word of what he said (outside of his brief aside about civics tests) made a lick of rational sense — and he alone among the candidates onstage seems to realize that none of it has to, and that, in fact, rational sense might be an active obstacle to victory in the primary. Expect his numbers to rise after tonight. And – my sole consolation here – expect Trump to start taking shots at him, too.

 

Forgive my bleakly breezy glibness on a matter I turned out to be wrong about. (I was only channeling Ramaswamy himself, who at the debate proposed a mandatory national civics test and then proceeded to immediately flunk it live onstage by claiming the U.S. Constitution helped win the American Revolution.) In my defense let me also throw another, smarter person under the bus: This same thought occurred to elections guru Nate Silver, who wrote it up with vastly more justification and substance in a piece subtitled “He’s probably going to rise in the polls.” Silver placed the likelihood that Ramaswamy would have a polling boomlet over the next month at 85 percent.

 

But while the jury is still out, the partial returns from last week’s polls taken after the debate are suggestive enough: Ramaswamy’s national numbers have not in fact risen as many of us expected them to after his first big-time exposure in a debate setting to the primary voters, not at the expense of Ron DeSantis, or anyone else in the field, for that matter. On Wednesday, August 23, the night of the debate, his polling position was 7.2 percent in the RealClearPolitics average. Today it sits at 7.5 percent — statistical noise in terms of the difference. Maybe a sharp uptick is in the offing; the evidence does not yet exist.

 

What did I get wrong? Alas, dear readers, my confession is this: I fear that I lacked faith in GOP voters. I looked at Vivek Ramaswamy’s oleaginous pandering and his repulsive mien — at times gently simpering, then smugly hectoring, willing to say anything to chase the mythical “unaligned MAGA voter” and never moored to even the slightest bit of principle, gravitas, or proper self-understanding — and thought to myself, “Yeah, I bet folks are gonna eat that up.” It turns out they will not, not particularly. I don’t want to get carried away here with praising the common sense of a Republican primary electorate that still supports Donald Trump for the 2024 nomination by an outright majority, so I will note that it is unsurprising that Ramaswamy hasn’t peeled off any Trump supporters. Right now, Trump support seems to be well and truly baked in and static. (We shall see if Trump’s continued failure to debate affects his numbers.)

 

But more importantly, he doesn’t seem to have impressed anyone new (hence the lack of any real churn in the post-debate polling averages). Or, to posit an alternate theory suggested by a colleague, whatever gains he might have made by introducing himself to a larger audience that night were canceled out by how many people — including some of his own weak or Vivek-curious supporters — saw him at his least appealing on that stage. As Josh Barro memorably pointed out, Ramaswamy instantly reminded entire swaths of Republican primary voters of every socially obnoxious classroom gunner twerp they ever knew in college, bloviating with the cocksure certitude of a freshman political science major who thinks he’s earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics. (The way Pence, Haley, and Christie all treated him, like lions batting away a small savannah creature with a swipe of their paws, did not help in this regard.)

 

He’s been caught out in multiple ridiculous contortions in interviews during the post-debate period, as well. Ramaswamy was notably the only candidate who was skipped during the debate when the time came to answer whether Vice President Pence did the right thing on January 6. National Review’s own John McCormack noticed this and buttonholed him in the spin room into giving a remarkably weaselly — and newsmaking, insofar as his was the only answer that departed from universal agreement with Pence — answer that combined flat-out impossibility with a special air of greasy condescension as to its obvious nonsensicality (this has proven to be Ramaswamy’s unique je ne sais quois). Thankfully, he then repeated it again this weekend for all to see on national television, on Meet the Press:

 

I would have done it very differently. I think that there was a historic opportunity that he missed to reunite this country in that window. What I would have said is, “this is a moment for a true national consensus where, there’s elements of what’s required for a functioning democracy in America. One is secure elections, and the second is a peaceful transfer of power. When those things come into conflict, that’s an opportunity for heroism. Here’s what I would have said: “We need single day voting on Election Day. We need paper ballots and we need government-issued ID matching the voter file. And if we have achieved that, we have achieved victory, and we should not have any further complaint about election integrity. So I would have driven it through the Senate . . . in my capacity as President of the Senate, I would have led through that level of reform. Then, on that condition, certified the election results, served it up to the President, President Trump, then to sign that into law, and on January 7, declared the reelection campaign, pursuant to a free and fair election.

 

It is important to quote the full welter of that insulting nonsense, to give a sense not only of the intellectual caliber of Ramaswamy’s campaign, but of how nakedly contemptuous it is of the voters he is appealing to. Leave aside the fact that the argument is facially constitutionally insane in ways obvious to an indifferently educated high schooler. (The vice president is “president of the Senate” in a technical sense only; he has zero legislative role or voting role except in cases of a 50–50 split. Come on, what are we even doing here, people? I shouldn’t need to explain this.) That it could never happen is beside the point; the point is that this fantasy is what he thinks his audience wants to hear. But the punch line is that a wonderful detail emerged today: On November 9, 2020, the day after Joe Biden’s election victory, Vivek Ramaswamy actually went on record calling for universal, mandatory, in-home electronic voting. That will keep the election secure! (He learned to change his tune to a more pleasing pitch to suit his intended audience’s tastes soon enough.)

 

Ramaswamy’s public persona is faring poorly under the heat of his first real exposure to national (as opposed to niche conservative/right-wing) attention and the weight of his past contradictions and present incoherence. And his position may deteriorate even further the more attention he draws, simply because as an arriviste his backlog of quotations is both rich enough to mine for oppo, entertaining enough for detractors to mock, and mysterious enough to draw the attention of the media. (Does anybody really know the first thing about Ramaswamy’s biotech company Roivant beyond what Wikipedia says? I suspect someone will soon.) This is where the long-term damage will really be done. People are finally interested in this overeager pilotfish of a candidate, and his inherent fraudulence combined with his manifest weakness makes him a far more promising target to attack — both ambitious and intensely vulnerable — than the indifferently paddling shark that is Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy.