Vivek Ramaswamy discovers that voters have their limits

Asking “What would Trump do?” is a bad way to make campaign strategy.

Vivek on stage with Trump earlier this month. (Alex Wong/Getty)

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What on earth were they thinking?

It’s the question raised by the decision Ohio governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and his campaign made to arrange, produce, and air an ad featuring the estranged mother of his opponent Amy Acton, an ad that has swallowed the extremely close race with just days left until the election.

The answer to that question lies in the Trumpian brain rot that has infected the entire Republican Party, ensconced as they are in their self-reinforcing information bubble. It’s a disease that convinces its victims that not only is cruelty the key to political success, but that the heart of the American voter is just as dark and ugly as those of the president and his acolytes themselves.

In defense of empathy

In the midst of a dark period in our national life, the fact that it looks like Ramaswamy is wrong — or at least that he may have found the outer limits of the electorate’s tolerance for morally repugnant campaigning — offers a faint glimmer of hope for the future.

A brief recap of events

As most people have heard by now, Acton suffered a traumatic childhood of deprivation and abuse. When she was 12, her stepfather was charged with raping her; she says the abuse had been going on for three years. Her mother, Donna Arthur, chose her husband over her children; she and her husband Cledith fled the jurisdiction before he could stand trial. Acton has had no contact with her mother since 1978, when she and her brother were removed from her custody.

This history was not a secret; Acton had spoken about her childhood abuse in interviews before. It is almost impossible to believe the Ramaswamy campaign was not aware of it before they recruited Donna Arthur to cut an ad for them. In the ad, Arthur — who, to repeat, has had no contact with Acton since 1978 — says “Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar … Don’t vote for people who lie. Don’t let her become your governor.”

The blowback was instantaneous.

“There is a decency we should expect from our public officials,” Barack Obama said at a rally in Cleveland. “There is no office that is worth stopping that low.”

But it wasn’t just Democrats.

In short order, one Republican after another criticized Ramaswamy for the ad and said it ought to be taken down, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Sen. Jon Husted, Nikki Haley, Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, and even Scott Jennings, the CNN Trump advocate. The conservative media has been split on the wisdom of the ad; some right-wing podcasters and TV hosts have gently criticized it, while others have praised it. (“Everybody in Ohio and the country should be listening to Amy Acton’s mom,” said Newsmax host Greg Kelly.)

But the most important endorsements came from the two most powerful Republicans in America.

Vice President JD Vance said the real problem was members of his own party who criticized the tactic.

“I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” he said.

Then President Trump weighed in, posting a long rant on Truth Social which included the assertion that “I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave as to come forward and explain that their son or daughter is a liar, and much worse,” and saying, “Lyin’ Amy Acton, who I’ve never even heard of before, has been lying about Vivek for the entire Campaign.”

The view from inside the bubble

Many a campaign has been undone by a “gaffe” or a late revelation, something unexpected and dramatic that torpedoes a candidate’s bid. But this was different.

Creating this ad required the involvement of multiple people at the campaign’s highest level, including the candidate himself. They would have had time to consider it and weigh the pros and cons. Together, they decided that it was a clever gambit.

According to Axios, “Sources close to Ramaswamy’s campaign said the ad tested well with ‘persuadable’ voters.” Which may have been true in a laboratory setting with no contextual information provided to those who watched it and whose responses were measured. But ads like this one don’t stay in a lab.

Now, with the torrent of media coverage that has resulted, anyone who sees the ad won’t say, “Jeez, if her own mother says she’s a liar, I’d better not vote for her.” Instead, they’re more likely to say, “Oh, there’s that ad with Amy Acton’s mother, the one who let her daughter get raped by her dirtbag husband. What the hell is wrong with Vivek Ramaswamy thinking this is going to make me want to vote for him?” And even those who will never see the ad know all about it.

When the controversy started blowing up, Ramaswamy could have cut his losses. He could have said “my campaign produced this ad, but as we’ve learned more about Acton and Arthur’s history, we’ve decided not to air it — let’s get back to talking about the issues.” Instead, he blamed Acton for making him do it.

“I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans,” Ramaswamy said. “And unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues.”

So really, did he have any choice but to get Acton’s (alleged) child-rapist-defending mother who hasn’t seen her daughter in almost half a century to attack her?

How Fox News whips viewers into a pre-midterm hysteria

Every time a candidate airs an attack ad, they make a calculation, that voters will be more persuaded by what the ad says about their opponent than what the ad says about them for having aired it. While voters say they don’t like negative campaigning, they respond to it, and if the attacks seem justified and relevant, the attacker can feel safe from backlash. If you’re saying your opponent took bribes or voted for bad policies, voters are unlikely to blame you.

But when the attacks get personal, the risk of backlash increases. And if a campaign is going to use someone’s family against them, they have to be very careful. Especially if the family member you’ve trotted out to offer testimony has a long history of petty crime and stood by while her preteen daughter was raped, then abandoned her.

But this is the nature of today’s right-wing bubble, whose residents are not only acculturated to a particular political style — cruel, vulgar, often hateful — but become convinced that it’s the only effective way to do politics, and to not do politics that way is to be weak and contemptible. That’s what JD Vance — a high-volume consumer of right-wing content and regular podcast guest — means when he says he’s “disgusted” by “whining” from Republicans about Ramaswamy’s ad.

The end of the Trump rally

The failure to anticipate the nearly inevitable reaction to the use of Acton’s mother springs directly from that inability to see how things look from outside the bubble. When the backlash began, Ramaswamy acted the way Trump does whenever people are appalled by something he has done or said: Don’t apologize, don’t retreat, blame your opponents, and double down.

Now look where that has gotten him. If there are any voters who were persuaded to vote for Ramaswamy by this advertisement, they haven’t presented themselves, while local and national media have been full of voters expressing their disgust with him. “We now deserve to lose this race,” one Ohio Republican strategist told Time magazine.

In fact, it was probably the dumbest decision any campaign made this year, or even in many years. We don’t know yet what the ultimate effects will be — as of this writing, no polls have been released on the race since the controversy over the ad blew up — but the Cook Political Report just moved the race from “toss-up” to “Leans Democratic.” Acton has held a slight lead in polls; we’ll see if it expands.

Being like Trump doesn’t work, especially in general elections

Trump has remade the Republican Party in his image over the last decade in a variety of ways, some of which have to do with policy but most of which are about style. In a typical Republican primary these days, candidates compete to see who can be most like Trump — unrestrained, bullying, misogynistic and racist, obsessed with dominating others.

The widespread assumption in conservative circles is that this is how you win, even when it looks like voters are recoiling in horror. As New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has said, Trump’s aides “believe there is something almost mystical about him, that he can hear frequencies that maybe they can’t,” and that’s why they should silence their doubts when he starts another social media beef, spends endless hours prattling on about his ballroom, or refuses to listen to cooler heads telling him that some decision he’s making (for instance, starting a war with Iran) might not work out well.

The same goes for much of the Republican Party: Even if they have doubts about a strategy, there’s a voice in their head saying “this is what Trump would do, so it must be a good idea.” We don’t know if anyone in the Ramaswamy campaign raised their hand when the Donna Arthur ad was being produced to say “I don’t know, guys, this could blow up in our faces.” But if they did, they were overruled.

What so few Republicans seem to grasp is that for all his success, if you just look at the scoreboard, Trump is actually an extremely unsuccessful politician. People don’t actually like him — his approval ratings have been weak his entire time in office, and they’re absolutely atrocious right now. This is the fifth national election in which he has been on the ballot or in office since he seized control of the GOP, and one could describe his record as 1-3. He became president in 2016 despite losing the popular vote; his party was slapped silly in the 2018 midterms; he lost in 2020; he got his only win in 2024, and a narrow one at that; and he’s about to suffer another midterm loss.

As much as Trump and his allies like to brag about the coalition he assembled in 2024, they make the mistake of believing that everyone who voted for him the one time he managed to win a majority was doing so because they love everything about him. But that was never true. There were a dozen reasons he won that year, none more important than the hangover of the 2022 burst in inflation. Voters who made the mistake of believing him when he said he’d immediately lower prices weren’t all MAGA converts who cheered his sadism and bigotry.

Whatever dark power Trump has that has enabled him to become president twice while being quite literally one of the most morally despicable human beings on Earth, it’s not easily duplicated by your average Republican candidate for Senate, House, or governor. When candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy ask “What would Trump do?” then do that thing, they often find that the voters respond with, “What an atrocious jerk. I’m definitely not voting for that guy.” It turns out that voters will tolerate a certain degree of negative campaigning — but they have their limits. As Vivek Ramaswamy is now finding out.

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