MARIETTA, Ohio — You may remember him from the 2024 presidential debate stage or from cable news promoting his book on “woke,” but who really is Vivek Ramaswamy, and why does he want to run Ohio so badly?
To help answer this question, the Daily Caller News Foundation traveled to Marietta — a city of about 13,000 in the state’s Appalachian southeast — where the billionaire-turned-Republican Ohio gubernatorial nominee was holding a town hall with veterans and Gold Star families on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. After the event, the Cincinnati-born Ramaswamy sat for a 15-minute interview with his surgeon wife, Apoorva, at his side, during which he discussed a variety of topics, including the campaign, artificial intelligence, data centers and the impact of the war with Iran.
The entrepreneur’s chances of adding “governor-elect” to his already-long resume in November, however, are effectively a coin flip. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report, for one, rates the race between Ramaswamy and his Democratic opponent — public health official Amy Acton — as a “toss up.”…