HENNIKER, N.H. — As other Republican presidential hopefuls wait to hire staff or even get into the race to conserve dollars, anti-woke biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has already poured $10 million of his own into his White House run.
Ramaswamy, who on Feb. 21 became the second Republican candidate to officially enter the race apart from former President Donald Trump, reported raising a total of $11.4 million on his first campaign finance filing with the Federal Election Commission last weekend.
Only $1.2 million of that came from actual donors, though, with almost all of the rest coming in the form of a single check from himself on March 1.
By way of comparison, Trump, who famously bragged that he was so rich that he didn’t need any donations, had put less than $2 million of his own money into his 2016 campaign through its first three months in 2015. He wound up spending $66 million out of his pocket by the time of the general election the following November.
Like other presidential candidates before him, Ramaswamy’s two donations totaling $10.25 million are technically loans, meaning that if his campaign becomes flush with other people’s money at some point, it could technically repay him.
He said at a campaign stop in Manchester last week that in his first five weeks, he hit 15,000 unique donors — a figure that will become more meaningful in the coming weeks as the Republican National Committee announces criteria for candidates hoping to make the first televised debate in Milwaukee in August.
The party, understanding their problems attracting “small dollar” donors, will be setting a minimum threshold for the number of contributors each candidate has, in addition to requiring a minimum polling threshold.
The RNC has not announced what those thresholds will be, although one Republican familiar with the discussions said the requirements for the first debate will be minimal with the goal of allowing as many announced candidates as possible onstage, at least early on.
“Whatever the criteria are, we’re well on track to beating them,” Ramaswamy said standing beside a campaign bus wrapped with a giant likeness of himself that let him hit all 10 counties in New Hampshire last week and which will let him tour Iowa in style this weekend.
Asked how he could possibly hope to move from the low single digits in polls where he is currently to a position from where he could actually win the nomination, he said that the last GOP president, who also was a political novice, started at the same position before he entered the race in 2015 compared to the others running.
“The same way Donald Trump did it in 2015. I’m actually polling and doing generally in the race about where Donald Trump was when he came down the escalator,” Ramaswamy said, neglecting to mention that the coup-attempting former president was already a household name at that point thanks to a long-running prime time TV show in which he portrayed a savvy billionaire.
“The dynamics of this race will change dramatically after that first debate,” said Ramaswamy, who is 37 and has become a minor star in Republican politics because of his book “Woke Inc.” that he wrote in 2021.
He has told interviewers that he has not set a limit on how much he is willing to spend of his estimated half-billion fortune on the presidential run. Campaign staff, meanwhile, scoff at the idea raised by some Republican critics that he is running merely to raise his profile to be able to make a plausible case for a Cabinet position or other senior-level job in the next GOP administration.
“That sure is a lot of effort to put your family through and put eight figures of your money so you can be HHS secretary,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a campaign senior adviser. “He actually believes he is the candidate to bring American unity.”