Again, I don’t want to see Dave Yost embarrass himself because I like the guy, the current Attorney General of Ohio.  But one of his biggest problems that was obvious to me when I went to his governor run announcement event was that he’s out of step with a skipping record, just a little too late on everything and slightly off-kilter with the flow of reality.  Under normal conditions, he might be able to run for governor and win, especially against the person the Democrats are going to put up, Amy Acton.  But these aren’t regular times.  I’m supporting Vivek Ramaswamy for Governor of Ohio, and the GOP should get behind him and make it happen.  Vivek is going to be governor no matter what any opposition tries to do to prevent it.  On the same day that Vivek announced he was running from West Chester, Ohio, President Trump came out immediately and endorsed Vivek to settle the issue and let all the other GOP contenders know where the President’s heart was on the matter.  And the person who wins in Ohio, no matter how good Vivek Ramaswamy is, will be the person President Trump picks.  The Trump endorsement is crucial because voters will rally to whoever that is. And for the Governor race of Ohio in 2026, it is Vivek Ramaswamy.  And to make sure nobody gets any funny ideas, Vivek Ramaswamy will be all over the media and state in an overwhelming fashion to make sure that he gets a chance to meet everyone he could possibly meet along the way.  He has been doing media on television almost every day since his announcement, which shows that he will work hard to win people’s votes.  Vivek will not take anything for granted, and he will win the election and be Ohio’s next governor. 

But upon hearing that Vivek was running, Dave Yost said some foolish things that won’t help him and actually make that skipping record syndrome much worse, and I have to warn him that if he wants a political future, he needs to not say such dumb things.  Among these was his attack on Vivek and trying to paint him as someone who starts a lot of projects but never finishes them, such as dropping out of the Presidential race, dropping out of D.O.G.E. with Elon Musk, and moving his company STRIVE to Texas because Ohio costs too much to do business in.  Yost is trying to portray Ramaswamy as a quitter.  But instead, Yost showed himself grotesquely out of touch as he didn’t get the GOP memo.  I learned about Vivek Ramaswamy’s running for governor with an early morning phone call two weeks before Christmas of 2024.  Something of a deal was made, and Trump wanted Vivek Ramaswamy to be Ohio’s governor because the goal was for the Trump economy to turn a Rust Belt state into one of the world’s tech leaders.  It’s the home state of J.D. Vance, who many in the MAGA movement would like to see carry the torch of the next four years of Trump.  Vivek is the right guy to bring all those elements together in Ohio.  Yost pointed out that Vivek dropped out of the presidential race after a fourth-place showing in Iowa, as if that said everything.  But the reality was that Vivek, while running for President, never went after Trump but was loyal the entire time.  So, Vivek wasn’t an either-or candidate but was a continuation of the MAGA movement, and if that were the criterion, people would have rather had Trump finish what was started during the first term.  Vivek instead ran on a MAGA platform to build on the issue rather than try to corrode it away with debate.

Most people who are affiliated with the GOP know about this Trump arrangement.  I asked my sources if I could talk about it, and they said I could, so it wasn’t super secret.  Mike DeWine, Ohio’s current governor, was then called to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump.  He and Jon Husted did this, and the deal was made.  DeWine would appoint Husted to the vacant senate seat left behind by Vance so that he wouldn’t be destroyed by Vivek becoming governor because Husted wanted to run too.  Trump is the party’s leader and will likely remain that way for the rest of his life.  He is the one who won that right, and people need to follow that vision.  Vivek Ramaswamy also had to do that to run for governor of a state when he wanted to be president.  That’s how you build successful teams, and all these guys played their part in creating a bigger vision of what the MAGA movement would be like after Trump was no longer in the White House.  But to make the most of it while he was there.  Time is short, opportunities are limited, and Dave Yost, to be wise, should hitch his wagon to one of these Trump strategies and not stick himself on the outside looking in.  Because once the window closes, it will close forever.  The Ohio GOP doesn’t need a media-driven mess for the upcoming primary.  It requires a unified party with the hands of Trump on it, and Dave Yost needs to find a place in it, not out of it, for his own good.  That’s the only warning shot I’ll give. If he didn’t know that Vivek was running, then that’s even worse because everyone else did, and it only shows how out of step he is, made even worse by every day that he does not get behind Vivek Ramaswamy. 

Then there is the Democrat Amy Acton and her dumb comments about Vivek as if she knows how to run against him.  I’ll make a prediction: She is going to be crushed by the debate skills of Vivek Ramaswamy.  Acton is the former Health Director of the State of Ohio appointed by DeWine, which caused all kinds of problems with COVID-19.  Amy Acton shut down Ohio as one of the leaders of all states to be the first to lockdown, which was standard of all the Democrat led states.  Only Ohio was supposed to be a red state.  DeWine allowed himself to be suckered by the stringy hair hippie style of Yellow Springs politics that Amy Acton represents, and it won’t go well for her.  I’m looking forward to it because Vivek can tell a story about her that has not been told yet.  She would have been wise to stay under a rock for what she did to Ohio during COVID-19, but she’s the best Democrats have, which says a lot about them.  She is running, but I don’t think the Democrats have any idea of what kind of buzz saw they are going to run into with this one.  Trump has his ideas about it because Ohio did lockdown during his last year in office, making it much harder for him to keep the nation together during that crisis.  So he will support Vivek vivaciously; let me just put it nicely.  Once everyone is done with Amy Acton, there won’t be a rock in the world to hide under, and she will not be able to hide her shame for the rest of her life, which she deserves.  And that’s just how it’s all going to go down.  So plan accordingly. 

Rich Hoffman

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