The mood at the Vivek Ramaswamy rally was upbeat—confident, even—but the cracks started to show before it began.

The town hall in the small Cleveland suburb of Parma was entitled “Pierogis, Pabst, and Patriots,” and there were plenty of all three on hand at the Union House Bar and Restaurant. But we weren’t really supposed to be here. We were supposed to have convened at the Cleveland Harley-Davidson outpost for a “Christians, Bikers & Patriots” campaign event, before a sudden cancellation necessitated a shift to this woodsy sports joint. There was no word on what had gone wrong with the bikers.

Still, the energy was real in this crimson-tinged bar, bustling with elderly Ohioans in OSU jerseys and MAGA merch alongside watery tubs of PBR. (Among the T-shirts: a red-ink outline of Charlie Kirk raising his fist, and a Trump-Vance shirt where the year was crossed out and replaced, in Sharpie, with 2028.) Alfred, a 60-year-old Filipino immigrant who was raised in Shaker Heights and works in the Parma public school system, told me he didn’t think, whatever the national narrative, that too many of his fellow conservatives were disaffected with Donald Trump or the current Republican Party. He loved the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement was operating, and anyway, as devout Catholics, he and his wife would never vote for a pro-choice Democrat like Amy Acton—Ramaswamy’s opponent in the bitter race for the Ohio governor’s mansion. Others I spoke to were similarly unbothered. Mark, a retired Air Force technician sitting at the bar, was planning on attending church that very evening and claimed to be far more concerned about property taxes than Ramaswamy’s Hinduism, one of the many issues that may work against the candidate in this very Christian state. To him, Ramaswamy’s religious objectors were just “morons who say stupid shit.”

Once the actual event kicked off, however, even the speakers couldn’t help but strike notes of concern. “If you choose not to decide in this election, you are supporting a cast of characters that wants to take our state in a fundamentally dangerous direction,” said Secretary of State Frank LaRosa, invoking Rush’s “Freewill” as he opened for the guest of honor and promoted his own campaign for state auditor. “The Democrats are feelin’ chippy,” he warned. “But there will be no blue wave. There will be a bright-red Ramaswamy tsunami!”

Ramaswamy finally took the stump to raucous applause and harped on his finely honed campaign planks—improving public schools, reducing property taxes and everyday costs, welcoming legal immigrants—while firing some culture-war drive-bys at the evils of “wokeism” and “transgenderism.” Former Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel subsequently took the mic and felt the need to emphasize Ramaswamy’s devotion to God. “I’ve been with Vivek at churches all over the state. There’s this band of Christian warriors who are following and supporting Vivek because he supports them,” Mandel stressed.

The sentiment proved to be a bellwether for the audience Q&A. An answer Ramaswamy gave condemning sanctuary cities wasn’t enough for a hoarse-voiced attendee who repeatedly interrupted: “Damned immigrants are hurtin’ everybody! We gotta get all of ’em out of here!”

Ramaswamy stumbled for a moment, responding that legal immigrants were still cool, which failed to satisfy the heckler. “All of ’em!” the attendee yelled. “Send in the military!”

Not long after, a separate dissident followed up, skipping over the queue to ask, twice, “Do you believe Jesus is God?”

“Sir, we’re going to ask you to be respectful,” Ramaswamy replied.

“It’s a simple question!” the old man yelled back.

“We don’t reward those who are just screaming for attention,” Ramaswamy replied, turning away from the troublemaker. The supportive crowd handed another microphone to a Republican-voting teacher who’d earlier objected to one of Ramaswamy’s screeds about the current state of education in the state, and asked a question about his commitment to ensuring that all Ohio kids, including those with disabilities, learn to read. Here, despite the criticism, the candidate sounded a warmer note.

“We’ll be respectful to anyone who has a tough question,” Ramaswamy declared. “If I can’t stand up here and answer a tough question, then I have no business running the state.”

The problem for him is that there are nothing but tough questions, and he may not have good answers for many of them. If you believe the polls, it seems clear that Ramaswamy—a Cincinnati-born disciple of the MAGA political school, biotech entrepreneur, and one-time Republican presidential candidate—could be the first Ohio Republican to lose a gubernatorial bid in 20 years. The once swingy Buckeye State has only reddened further since Donald Trump flipped it in his first presidential bid, and the MAGA movement’s heir apparent, Vice President J.D. Vance, famously hails from here. Yet this could be the state where Ramaswamy, who once pitched himself as a younger and more capable Trump, ends up buckling to Acton, a doctor and first-time candidate who led Ohio’s Department of Health in the early days of its COVID response. There are a lot of reasons for this: He’s a pro–data center billionaire running for office at a moment when even Republican super PAC ads are pillorying billionaires and data centers. His Harvard-and-Yale pedigree and debate-me-bro verbosity make him come off more like a snob than a man of the people. He gets heckled a lot, even amid ostensibly friendly crowds. The social media posts where he does try to present himself as down-to-earth are frequently subjected to viral mockery. He doesn’t seem to be able to activate Republicans in a year when Buckeye Dems are actually motivated to hit the polls. The messages from his campaign, and from his well-funded supporters, have taken some incredibly vicious tacks—including, most recently........

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