The Internet Couldn’t Save Vivek Ramaswamy

At a ritzy boutique hotel on Monday night in Des Moines, Iowa, dozens of young voters braved subzero temperatures to see Vivek Ramaswamy deliver what they would soon learn to be his final speech as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

After thanking his team, campaign volunteers, and, of course, everyone watching the livestream, Ramaswamy suspended his campaign. “We’ve looked at it every which way and I think that it’s true that we did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight,” Ramaswamy told his room of supporters. “There is no path for me to be the next president absent things we don’t want to see in this country.”

Since Ramaswamy launched his campaign last February, his team had set out to energize millennials and Gen-Z voters, demographics that have traditionally supported Democrats in overwhelming numbers and that other Republican politicians have largely written off. To do so, the campaign flooded the internet at every opportunity with his “anti-woke” vision for America in TikTok videos, Instagram livestreams, and podcast appearances. He tried to weaponize the far-right corners of the internet as well, boosting conspiracies like the great replacement theory.

“When we launched the campaign, we set up a podcast. You typically hire political staff in first, but we started with production staff,” a senior Ramaswamy staffer told WIRED while describing the campaign’s digital media strategy Monday night. “One of our first hires was a videographer to follow him around seven days a week.”

But it wasn’t enough. As millennial indie favorites from artists like the Naked and Famous boomed over the ballroom’s PA system Monday night, it became clear that social media content—even when paired with a ceaseless ground game—cannot save a longshot presidential campaign. Less than an hour after caucus doors opened, major news outlets like ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC had called the state for former president Donald Trump, and the late-game “surge” the Ramaswamy campaign foretold never actualized. As of publication, Ramaswamy finished with around 8 percent of the vote in Iowa, less than half of what Haley’s third-place finish achieved.

Even as temperatures fell to well below zero over the weekend, Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old entrepreneur who funded his campaign with the fortune he’d made in the biotech industry, continued to shake mitten-covered hands in packed pizza joints and American Legion halls. Before arriving at the hotel Monday evening, Ramaswamy had finished an impressive monthslong tour of the state, holding nearly 400 events across every county hoping to “shock” the pollsters, he repeatedly said, by securing more points than Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley.

But most of his campaign was focused on the internet. While DeSantis and Haley drew comparable crowds in-person, Ramaswamy had them beat online. While racing from one campaign event to another, Ramaswamy spent his travel time on X livestreams, answering audience questions or holding ridealong interviews with political content creators like Link Lauren. Instead of cable news hits and newspaper interviews, the Ramaswamy campaign invited a slate of popular right-wing personalities and influencers, like Candace Owens, Benny Johnson, Mike Cernovich, and Isabel Brown to join them along the campaign trail instead.

Brown, who has nearly 300,000 followers on TikTok, posted a video with Ramaswamy on Friday as she followed the campaign on the ground at its events in Iowa. In it, Brown praises Ramaswamy for being a candidate young enough to know what Wi-Fi is. Ramaswamy is seen holding his son, invoking conspiracy theories and claims that the deadly January 6 riot at the Capitol was an inside job. As of publication, the video has more than 540,000 views on the platform. Brown said she plans to post a vlog documenting her time with the campaign to YouTube later this week.

Ramaswamy’s work online did appeal to some of the people his campaign was targeting: “I’ve really enjoyed the campaign that he’s run. His Instagram is where I follow him, and he’s been very accessible. I’ve caught up on his livestreams, and he’s just talking all the time,” Daniel Lange, a 21-year-old college student who was in town on a school trip from Colorado told WIRED on Monday night. “I think people take him seriously enough, even though he’s campaigning in a very nontraditional way.”

Gabe Conley, a 30-year-old caucus-goer, thinks Ramaswamy is the future of the Republican party. “I think his biggest problem is exposure,” Conley told WIRED. “Because the media has actively tried to suppress his campaign. I really believe that. So it helps to have more involvement from those influencers. Like Candace Owens is somebody that a lot of conservatives think highly of. And then some of the other influencers are just people with large followings. I think more exposure for Vivek is better, because my feeling is that when you have more exposure to this guy, you actually get more impressed with him because he’s a really impressive guy.”

On the eve of the caucus, famous YouTuber turned professional boxer Jake Paul was set to fly into Iowa in an effort to rally young caucus-goers. But because of the weather, a spokesperson told WIRED, Paul was unable to fly out. So instead of stumping for Ramaswamy in-person, the pair held a joint Instagram livestream Sunday evening, leveraging Paul’s more than 25 million followers on the platform.

“There’s a bigger purpose than being cold sometimes, and that’s what I think about in the ice bath every morning,” Paul said on the livestream, trying to convince voters to go outside.

Paul had already endorsed Ramaswamy, or at least appeared to, in a video posted to Paul’s TikTok account in September. In the video, the pair jerk from side to side to the underlying music, with the caption, “How come more politicians don’t connect with the younger generation with social media posts?” After the video went up, Ramaswamy attended at least one of Paul’s boxing matches where he sat front row—another opportunity for content.

“Super proud of Vivek for taking the political world by storm and shaking up the broken system,” Paul wrote on X shortly after Ramaswamy suspended his campaign. “As the youngest and sharpest out there, I know this is just the start of his story.”

But influencers can only do so much. After failing to qualify for the last debate ahead of the caucus, Ramaswamy streamed with Tim Pool, the right-wing podcaster, for an hourslong conversation on his show, Timcast, while DeSantis and Haley took to the CNN debate stage. Their conversation has nearly one million views on YouTube.

“The mainstream media is dead. They’re dead. They just haven’t realized it yet, and the American people are getting off that addiction,” a senior staffer on the Ramaswamy campaign told me Monday night, explaining the campaign focused much of its efforts online. “When you look at the types of voters that make up the America First movement, which is the majority of the base of the Republican Party, they get their news from alternative media.”

Despite the enormous audiences belonging to the creators that Ramaswamy’s team worked with, it’s impossible to know how many of their followers were eligible, or even willing, to vote in Iowa. The old-school, YouTube-style collabs that Ramaswamy tried to emulate helped him reach new viewers, but in the end, failed to connect him with the voters he needed.

Even so, some young voters appear to be up for grabs. Recent polling has shown that a growing number of young voters could abandon President Joe Biden in this year’s general election and the Trump team hasn’t been shy about its desire to win them over. In December, Semafor reported that the Trump team has increased its youth outreach with the former president attending college football games and sitting down for podcast interviews.

Before dropping out, Ramaswamy refused to entertain questions about becoming Trump’s vice president. After suggesting Ramaswamy could make a “very good” running mate back in August, Trump seemingly turned on him on the eve of the caucus, writing that he wasn’t “MAGA” in a post to Truth Social. But their relationship could be on the mend. After announcing that he would be dropping out of the race, Ramaswamy said that he was endorsing Trump and plans to join him at a rally in New Hampshire on Tuesday.

“We’re very proud of it,” Ramaswamy told WIRED of the internet-first campaign he ran as he exited the party venue Monday night. “And I think that’s the future.”