Maybe That Ramaswamy Ad Is Working Exactly As Planned

L: Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo; R: AP Photo/Tony Dejak, File

Unlike many progressives, I am not heartened by the Republican stalwarts turning their back on Vivek Ramaswamy and denouncing his smarmy manipulation of a family tragedy. Those people are not who the ad was designed to reach. What if the ad isn’t blowing up in Ramaswamy’s face; what if it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to: Disgusting decent Ohioans so much, they don’t even bother to vote.

Steve Deace, a conservative talk-show host based in Iowa, has been pleading with his party to adopt this strategy for weeks. With fundamentals tilting the playing ground so fully in the Democrats’ favor, Deace argues, Republicans’ only hope is to disenchant all but the most engaged parts of their base. They need moderate Republicans and independents–“normies”–to stay home. As he puts it:

Our margins with normies are like minus 30 or something…Drive down as much of that normie vote as you can. Make the environment as negative and toxic as you can.

It is hard to think of something more negative and toxic than platforming an enabler of sexual abuse to dredge up one of the most painful things a child can survive.

It’s true that relentlessly negative campaigns usually attract only the most motivated and ideological voters. The 2016 election is a case study, as the depressed turnout among an uninspired electorate allowed an emergent MAGA base (who showed up like they hadn’t before) to create the very timeline we’re in.

That’s the only framework that makes Ramaswamy’s decision to embrace and promote the ad make sense. Feeding the fire transmutes the back-and-forth over how terrible it is into a purposeful distraction. Normie Ohio voters probably would prefer that candidates were talking jobs and data centers; who could blame them for tuning out such darkness? Yet what elected official with any values could stand to let that ad go by without comment? Welcome to the weaponization of empathy.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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