Last week, following a full day of people thinking it might be too unfair to blame the Vivek Ramaswamy Ohio gubernatorial campaign for an ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother, the campaign came forward not just to take credit for the ad, but to announce their plans to drop $4 million to spread it far and wide. Because they thought it was like, a really good, really powerful ad.
And it has been! Just not in the way that Ramaswamy had hoped. Despite both Donald Trump and JD Vance backing the ad and promising everyone that it is good, actually, the ad was so bad and so damaging that public polls and leaked internal polls found him losing to Acton not long after it debuted.
Even Trump saying that it was unfair that anyone would suggest that the ad was anything other than a mother who hadn’t seen her child for 50 years testifying as an expert to the fact that she was lying about Vivek Ramaswamy, in particular, and nothing else? Well, that didn’t seem to help much, either.
Even people in his own party like Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Nikki Haley (who went so far as to say “he’s a bad guy”), and Nancy Mace have come out against the ad, probably realizing it could hurt them more than help him at this point. Even leaders in the biotech industry where Ramaswamy made his money have come out to tell him he needs to take it down and apologize to Acton.
Everyone who builds a company in our industry asks for trust: from patients who take an unproven medicine and from the people who fund and prescribe it. You asked for that trust when you built Roivant, and you received it. The obligations that come with it are simple. Follow the evidence. Never use the suffering of the people who depend on your judgment against them. Those obligations do not lapse when you file for office, and your advertisement violates both. […]
Consider the message. We work every day with people who have disclosed abuse, or an illness they spent years unable to speak about. Their willingness to seek help rests on a single promise: that their vulnerability will be met with respect. In pursuit of your political ambition, your advertisement attempts to shame a survivor of rape and deny the awful family trauma she experienced, as supported by overwhelming evidence. Anyone who has sat with a patient knows the harm in that message. You know it too.
Hell, Ramaswamy’s own 8th grade teacher and honor society advisor has even come forward to chastise him. A Trump advisor came forward anonymously to say they told him the ad was a bad idea before it ever ran.
It’s almost as though people think that kind of thing is pretty gross.
Ramaswamy has even found himself confronted on the campaign trail by people who think that, because of this ad and the other one featuring an actual pedophile, he might be interested in cheering for the pedos of America.
In the meantime, even more has come out about Cledith Arthur, the stepfather Acton accused of raping her until the age of 12. Like the indictment from when he was accused of raping his own daughter.
One of his other daughters has also come forward to back up Acton’s story about living in a tent and to say that she believes that he raped her, because he had raped her other, since-deceased sister Christine “more than once.”
“It was a terrible time for our family and it’s very hard to talk about it,” she told the Daily Mail. “My brother won’t say anything at all. It’s a nightmare for us to relive what happened in our family after all these years.”
“Christine was a wonderful person but she was very damaged by it,” she added. “It affected her. Our whole family was. Seeing it played out in this campaign and on TV has brought a lot of terrible memories back.”
Alas, it seems they only got to drop $1 million on promoting the ad, as they’ve pulled it for just no apparent reason following the bad polling. Ramaswamy told reporters that the ad “ran to completion.” So he’s pulling it, but not admitting that there was anything wrong with it or that they had to pull it since it was killing him and making him look like the terrible person he very obviously is. Surely, everyone will believe that this was the plan all along, even though it looks exactly as though he’s admitting it hasn’t worked out the way he’d hoped.
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If this tanks Ramaswamy’s campaign, it’s going to be a very big deal for Republicans. Donald Trump got elected despite, and probably even because of, all the horrible things he said about women. I don’t think anyone thought there were lines left to cross here, anything that could go too far. If Republicans have to now consider that there is a “too far” they could possibly go when it comes to being horrible to women, that could certainly make a few of them nervous about how to navigate 2028. Should they not call female reporters “pigs” or will people still find that charming?
What if Vivek loses and Max Miller, accused wife beater and Republican candidate to represent Ohio’s 7th District wins? Will it be determined that beating a woman is okay but siding with her rapist isn’t? Or vice versa if Vivek wins and he loses? How will future Republicans figure this out?
These are just very complicated issues, and a Republican candidate needs to learn the precise way to denigrate women that will earn him favor with the misogynists but still be something the pretend moderates can pretend to ignore and say they haven’t heard about.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Disgusting little people, every fucking one of them.
And I think it's been pulled too late to change peoples' opinions or perceptions.
And, as Axios first reported, this was happening as internal GOP polling showed his standing sinking dramatically as a result of the ad.
“Our numbers cratered, everyone screamed at us, I don’t want to ever repeat anything like this again,” a Ramaswamy ally says. “We could not escape it.”
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Nor should you be able to escape this shit TYVFM:
https://zeteo.com/p/vivek-ramaswamy-pulls-his-disturbing-ad