Several hundred people from this Appalachian town of 2,000 had turned out for the county GOP’s Lincoln Day dinner, and the guest of honor, Vivek Ramaswamy, stood on a makeshift stage underneath a balloon arch and an American flag. “We call it the American dream for a reason,” he told the crowd, “because there is no Canadian dream, there is no British dream, there is no Chinese dream.”
Not everyone in the room was buying what he was selling. At the back table, Setys Kelly, the Ramaswamy campaign’s captain in nearby Clark County, clapped throughout his speech. But when the candidate invoked the idea that anyone could come to the United States and achieve the American dream, she shook her head. “I’m going to be a hard no on that,” said Kelly, a white woman. “You need to be an American to do the American dream.” She added, referencing her hometown: “I come from Springfield, land of the Haitians. … I just don’t want any more of that kind of immigration where they just dump them on you.”
It is this sort of sentiment that Ramaswamy must navigate as the Republican nominee to be Ohio’s next governor, with issues of race, religion and identity swirling beneath the surface of the campaign. The candidate, an Indian American with immigrant parents, left a lucrative career in biotechnology to run for president in 2024 and immediately won prominence on the national stage. He won the GOP primary for Ohio governor comfortably last month after batting down Casey Putsch, a far-right challenger who attacked him over his race and his Hindu faith.
Ramaswamy, 40, has built his political identity around a revivalist message of meritocracy and national pride, promising to turn Ohio into “the cradle of the American dream once again.” But the reception in Piketon suggests a tension at the heart of his appeal. The very voters he needs to rally are often the ones most skeptical of the open-arms immigration narrative he champions, seeing it as a threat rather than an opportunity.
The governor’s race in Ohio is emerging as a test case for whether the Republican Party’s increasingly diverse slate of candidates can hold together a coalition that remains overwhelmingly white and culturally conservative. Ramaswamy’s stump speech leans heavily on the idea that American identity is defined by creed, not ancestry. Yet in places like Piketon, the distinction is not always accepted.
For Ramaswamy, the path to victory in November will require threading a narrow needle. He must energize the base without alienating the more moderate voters who will decide a general election, all while confronting the reality that for some of his own supporters, the American dream has a color and a religion attached to it. The question is whether he can persuade them to see themselves in his vision, or whether the skepticism at the back table will prove more powerful than the applause.
