The rise and (probably swift) fall of Vivek Ramaswamy
Over the past several months I’ve hesitated to write much about Vivek Ramaswamy, because I’ve seen this kind of candidate before. He’s the kind of political doofus who has no idea how campaigning or strategy works, but is perfectly willing to go on TV and make a fool of himself in interview after interview under the guise that any publicity is good publicity. And we know how this story usually ends.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign is simply a media creation. I don’t mean that Fox News or right wing media created him. I mean that the mainstream media created him. For months on end, outlets like CNN and MSNBC have booked this clown and playfully sparred with him as if this were all a game. It’s bad politics and bad journalism, but it’s good for ratings. And because Ramaswamy is perfectly willing to keep going on TV and taking pies to the face, the media has been perfectly willing to keep booking him.
The kicker is that, in spite of increasing hype, he’s not getting anywhere. The media decided beforehand that Ramaswamy was going to win the first Republican debate, and so even though he came off as an overmatched buffoon who had wandered on stage by accident, most of the media pegged him as the standout winner.
But it turns out the public doesn’t see it that way. Even Republican primary voters don’t seem to see it that way. Before the debate, Ramaswamy was at 10% in the Emerson poll. Now he’s at 9% in the Emerson poll. Before the debate he was at 7% in the Reuters poll. Now he’s at 5% in the Reuters poll. Not only did he fail to gain any supporters during the debate, he appears to have lost a fraction of the supporters that he did have.
Of course the media is now working even harder than ever to turn Ramaswamy into a contender. Andrea Mitchell did an embarrassingly complimentary interview with him on MSNBC on Tuesday. If anything, the less viable Ramaswamy is becoming, the softer the media is now going on him, in the hope of propping him up and keeping him in the game.
We’ve seen this movie before. In fact we’ve already seen it in this election cycle. About two years ago the mainstream media (on the left and right) collectively decided that Ron DeSantis was going to be a 2024 contender, and then worked very hard to put him into contention. Fox News hyped him every day. MSNBC spent every day portraying him as dangerously powerful, which Republican candidates see as positive publicity. As a result DeSantis was polling at around 40% in Republican primary voting before the race even began. Then he entered the race and did a campaign tour, and everyone saw that he was actually a lightweight idiot, and his numbers have since plummeted down to around 15%.
Now that the media is finally starting to give up on the idea that it can get ratings by hyping up DeSantis, it’s left looking for a new ratings chew toy. And Ramaswamy is volunteering to be it. It doesn’t matter that he’s polling in the single digits, and that his very first debate performance caused his numbers to go down. There is often very little correlation between who has momentum, and who the media claims has momentum.
Of course this is nothing new. For the past several elections the media has started things off by trying to cast each candidate into whatever role they think might be best for ratings. In 2020 the media decided that Andrew Yang would be good for ratings, so it gave him endless free exposure, even though his poll numbers always showed that almost no one was interested in voting for him. In 2016 the media decided to cast Bernie Sanders as the people’s candidate and Hillary Clinton as some corporate shill, even though they had voted the same way 93% of the time while they were in the Senate together. The narrative that the media invents for each candidate is nearly always a work of fiction. And even as it becomes more clear to all that the assigned narratives aren’t accurate, the media tries harder than ever to get those narratives to stick. After all, these are the narratives about each candidate that the media calculated from the start would be best for ratings.
And so now we’re stuck with Vivek Ramaswamy hype on our television all day every day, simply because the media outlets have determined that people are more inclined to stare at their televisions when he’s being discussed, even though polling shows that almost no one has any interest in voting for him.
Again, I can’t stress this enough: when news outlets like MSNBC and CNN spend all day portraying someone like Vivek Ramaswamy as being dangerously powerful, they’re not earnestly sounding the alarm about him. They’re not trying to debunk him for your benefit. They’re using negative hype to prop him up, so that he’ll be seen as consequential enough for audiences to feel like they have to stop and stare at any coverage of this guy, in the name of “vigilance.”
So how do you correctly cover someone like Vivek Ramaswamy? You don’t. You don’t cover him, at least not on a regular basis. What’s the point? He’s polling in the single digits and dropping. If this were a reality show, he might be the main character. But this is a presidential election – and this guy has virtually no support among even his own party’s primary voters. If his numbers fundamentally change and he becomes relevant to this election, I’ll have to more to say about him. But as things stand, the media’s escalating hype for him is nothing more than an empty ratings grab.
