Vivek Ramaswamy suspends presidential campaign, endorses Trump

DES MOINES — Vivek Ramaswamy suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination after a deflating Iowa caucus result on Monday, throwing his weight behind former President Donald Trump.

The Ohio biotech entrepreneur, who promised his far-right and anti-establishment policy proposals could unite the country around a shared identity, garnered less than 8 percent in Iowa’s caucuses.

He trailed far behind Trump, who pulled in more than 51 percent of the votes, and Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, who garnered 21 percent and 19 percent, respectively, with 97 percent of precincts reporting at 11:30 p.m. Monday.

“We are going to suspend this presidential campaign,” Ramaswamy said. “There is no path for me to be the next president, absent things that we don’t want to see happen in this country.”

Ramaswamy campaigned at lightning pace in Iowa in the months leading up to the caucuses. He held more than 200 campaign events and visited each Iowa county twice, his campaign said.

Ahead of the contest, Ramaswamy, a political newcomer, set sky-high expectations for himself, predicting he would win the Iowa caucuses and “send a shock through the system.”

When it was clear those predictions did not pan out, he told supporters in Des Moines on Monday night he had no path to the Oval Office.

Ramaswamy told reporters the strategy his campaign relied on — turning out non-traditional Republicans and first-time caucusgoers — failed to impact the results.

He failed, he said, to “bring a sufficiently large number of them to actually sufficiently swing the election. I think because of the nature of the caucus process, it’s even different from a primary, that proved too difficult to actually translate into meaningful results.”

Ramaswamy also told supporters he had called Trump to offer his support.

“For the next journey of this race, we are going to make sure that our movement is the one that actually leads and saves this country in the next step,” he said.

Ramaswamy, 38, declared his candidacy last year as a relatively obscure business owner, author and conservative activist. He has not held political office and rarely voted, casting his first Republican presidential vote for Trump in 2020.

He hung his campaign on outlandish policy positions like firing 75 percent of the federal government and raising the national voting age to 25. He campaigned heavily against the use of eminent domain to seize land for carbon capture pipelines, a motivating issue for some Republicans.

On Monday, Ramaswamy called on his Republican opponents to unite behind Trump, who he has praised throughout the campaign despite opposing him in the primary.

"I think the right thing for them to do, at this point, would be to solidify behind, not only a Republican candidate, but the best remaining candidate for U.S. president," he said.

Comments: cmccullough@qctimes.com