Vivek Ramaswamy Hires Trump’s Former Campaign Associates to Run Campaign in New Hampshire
- The 37-year-old Indian American has also launched a daily podcast to connect with voters and boost his national image.
Entrepreneur and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is going full steam ahead with his mission to secure the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election. Even if it seems like a Quixotic exercise, with heavyweights sucking out the oxygen, he has hired two of Donald Trump’s former campaign associates to run his campaign in New Hampshire, the first primary state.
Fred Doucette, whom Politico describes as “a two-time state campaign co-chair for Trump and deputy majority leader in the New Hampshire House, is now a senior strategist and state chair. Joshua Whitehouse, “a Trump 2016 alum who later served as White House liaison to the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security,” is the state director. Politico notes that “the hires show cracks in Trump’s New Hampshire coalition, even as he continues to command the party’s base in polls.”
The 37-year-old Indian American is campaigning against “woke” policies, ideas, and institutions, pledging to end things like affirmative action while trying to court the MAGA base. However, Axios has reported that so far, he “hasn’t cracked 1 percent support in the polls.”
In an attempt to boost his image and build what his aides describe as “a state-of-the-art media production studio,” Ramaswamy has launched a daily podcast “pull back the curtain on the political process” through interviews with insiders like former Attorney General Bill Barr, as reported by Axios.
The podcast called the Vivek Show, “is an attempt to connect with voters and boost his national name ID while showing how policy decisions get made and what it looks like to run for president,” said the Axios report. The news website noted that the launch is “just part of an initial $10 million investment toward creating a media production studio within his long-shot political campaign — an atypical operation that will continue even if he drops out of the race.”
Meanwhile, his team told Axios that Ramaswamy “is in it for the long-haul.” They have received donations from “around 16,000 people across all 50 states in the first month,” adding that “nearly 30 percent of reported donors are new GOP or first-time digital political donors.”