WASHINGTON — Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who just launched his run for governor of Ohio in next year’s election, spoke exclusively with Breitbart News on Monday evening after his campaign launch to argue Ohio can lead the nation in an economic and education revival with the right leadership.
“The core message is that Ohio is going to be the state of excellence in America and Donald Trump is going to Make America Great Again and revive our conviction in Ohio and in America,” Ramaswamy told Breitbart News.
“We need a leader at home who’s going to revive our conviction in Ohio,” he continued. “Especially in the next couple years as a lot of federal programs are jettisoned, as they should be, and returned back to the states and the people, we need a governor here at home and frankly strong governors across the states that stand for strong conservative values and actually do what’s right with education and healthcare. Shutting down the Department of Education is a great first step, and it’s the right one to pursue, but we still have a separate educational crisis of achievement in this country that has to be addressed at the state level. So my view is Ohio can actually be the leading state in the country to not only create new business formation but also to create family formation. We’re a conservative state, just like Texas and Florida and others, but if we’re governed like one that will actually allow this to be a state where more people move in not out and where they have more kids and families in this state and those kids actually go on to stay in this state. I believe Ohio because it led the way in the first industrial revolution has a tradition of greatness, and has a tradition of leading the country. I see no reason why Ohio can’t these next few years be the state that leads the country when it comes to economic growth and when it comes to especially giving a world class education to kids at a young age.”
President Donald Trump endorsed Ramaswamy within minutes of his campaign launch, saying the former rival from the 2024 GOP presidential primaries has his “complete and total endorsement.”
Ramaswamy told Breitbart News that he wants to “build on” Trump’s successes with working class and minority voters and that part of his pitch in his campaign in Ohio is designed to target those traditionally Democrat voters disillusioned with their party’s leftward lurch.
“I think we got to build on that foundation. President Trump, one of the things that made him so compelling to independent voters and even to Democrats, is that he isn’t a politician,” Ramaswamy said.
“He’s a businessman. I do think we can then build on that foundation,” he further outlined. “I don’t think a traditional career politician is going to be able to replicate that. I think it’s going to take somebody who’s able to speak with his level of authenticity and his level of candor to actually win the trust of a lot of those former Obama voters who realized that eight-year Obama tenure didn’t work for them. I don’t think a politician who’s cut from a square suit who’s reciting standard talking points is going to be able to achieve that result. So I think President Trump laid the foundation and it’s going to take more frankly outsiders like President Trump to build on that and that’s a big part of what I’m looking to build on here in Ohio. I addressed my message to a lot of Democrats even tonight, to say if you’re an orphaned Democrat or independent we will disagree on a lot of things but if you care about your kids living a better life than you did and actually care about educational excellence for your kids then we’re on the same team on this journey even though we disagree on a lot. Get the cell phones out of the schools, a basic proposal I rolled out tonight. Merit-based pay for teachers, something I rolled out tonight as well. Pay teachers and principals and administrators according to their actual results and to be clear the best teachers deserve to be paid a lot more than they are right now but we’re not getting the best teachers because there’s no meritocracy in compensation. So I think there’s a common ground here we can find with working class voters in Ohio who say ‘you know what? The Democratic Party that I left to join President Trump is part of a broader, longer run shift.’ I’m hoping to carry that torch forward to make Ohio a conservative state that governs according to conservative principles.”
Vivek Ramaswamy steps on stage at CTL Aerospace on February 24, 2025 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Ramaswamy launched his Ohio gubernatorial campaign during the event. (Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
Ramaswamy also noted he has close relationships with Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who is from Ohio as well and served as one of the state’s U.S. Senators before he was elected alongside Trump.
“We want to create a rising tide that lifts President Trump’s agenda across the country and I think that we’re going to need real partners at the state level who share both the ideology but also the ability so that’s what I’m doing here,” Ramaswamy said. “I’m grateful for the great foundation that they’ve laid and the great relationship we have to be their partners in doing it.”
He also told Breitbart News an interesting story that the aerospace company on whose premises he launched his campaign on Monday evening was also the spot where he first attended a Trump rally—at the urging of none other than Vance himself—many years ago.
“The event we had tonight was actually at the place where the first political event I ever went to was, which was a Trump rally. It’s an aerospace company in Butler County. It’s close to my first house where I grew up and lived, and pretty close to where JD grew up,” Ramaswamy said. “Nancy Nix [a local Butler County official] came up and told a story about how she had been asked to bring a friend to a rally for the first time, and that was me—and the person who asked her to do it was JD. That was about six years ago at the site where we launched this today. So it was a fun little bit of history.”
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