Vivek Ramaswamy is asking Ohio to elect him governor on Nov. 3. In December 2024 he told the country why its engineers were losing out to foreigners, and the answer was Americans.

He was still co-chairing the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Elon Musk, weeks from launching his campaign, when he took up a question then splitting the American right: why do the country’s largest technology companies so often hire foreign-born engineers instead of Americans?

“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation),” he wrote on X. “A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture.”

“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer).”

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he added. Normalcy, he wrote, “doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent,” and if the country pretended otherwise, “we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.”

What America needed was a culture that “once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.”

He was describing the country. Ohio is in it.

Twenty-nine visas

Ramaswamy had not been watching the practice from a distance. Federal records from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services H-1B Employer Data Hub show that Roivant Sciences, the pharmaceutical company he founded and built his fortune on, had 29 H-1B applications approved between 2018 and 2023. Politico first reported the figure in September 2023. He had stepped down as chief executive in February 2021 and stayed on as board chair until he launched his presidential campaign two years later.

The company hired foreign workers under the program. Its founder then explained to the country that American culture was the reason companies do that.

His own party turned first

The December post did not draw its sharpest response from Democrats. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who had run against him in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, answered him directly.

“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” Haley wrote. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”

Ramaswamy was out of DOGE on Jan. 20, 2025 — Inauguration Day — after the post reportedly landed badly inside Donald Trump’s orbit. He has consistently said the exit was his own decision. More than a year later, NBC News reported that parts of the right still had not forgiven him for it.

The money left the state

He made his fortune in Ohio. In November 2024 he moved Strive Asset Management’s headquarters out of Columbus to Dallas, along with roughly $1.7 billion in assets.

He has campaigned largely from the air. Flight records published by The Rooster, the Columbus newsletter tracking his travel, show he used a Bombardier Global 5500 54 times in 2026, an estimated $200,000 in private jet costs. On the night of July 4, while Ohio held 250th-anniversary celebrations across all 88 counties, he flew from Columbus to Paris — his fifth international private jet trip of the year.

‘I can’t say it’s the best state’

On Jan. 24, 2023, Ramaswamy — then co-founder and executive chairman of Strive — gave a talk at Hillsdale College in Michigan titled “The Rebellious Entrepreneur.” About 20 seconds in, he described a conversation with a student named Emily, who had asked him what his favorite state was.

“And I said, ‘Ohio is a good state; I can’t say it’s the best state,’” he told the audience. “She said, ‘I can tell you what’s the best state, it’s Indiana,’ where she’s from. So it’s the cussedness of the Hillsdale student.”

The clip resurfaced in early May 2026, days after he won the Republican primary.

What Ramaswamy says

He has a response to each of these, and on the visa question the response is more substantial than his critics usually allow.

Ramaswamy is not a defender of the H-1B program. He has attacked it repeatedly, and from the right. He told Politico in 2023 that the system was bad for everyone involved: “The lottery system needs to be replaced by actual meritocratic admission. It’s a form of indentured servitude that only accrues to the benefit of the company that sponsored an H-1B immigrant. I’ll gut it.”

He repeated it the day after the December 2024 post drew fire. “Yup, I’ve long said the current H-1B system is badly broken & needs to be gutted,” he wrote. “It shouldn’t use a lottery, it should be based on pure MERIT. It shouldn’t tether workers to just one corporation. Same principles I favor today.”

What that proposal does is replace the lottery with a merit ranking. The flow of foreign engineers into American workplaces gets sorted differently. It does not stop, and Ramaswamy has never proposed stopping it.

On his own company’s 29 visas, his press secretary at the time, Tricia McLaughlin, told Politico that a policymaker’s job “is to do what’s right for a country overall: the system is broken and needs to be fixed.” She added: “Vivek believes that regulations overseeing the U.S. energy sector are badly broken, but he still uses water and electricity. This is the same.”

On Strive, he has said the relocation was made by a new chief executive after a merger, and that it motivated him to run for governor in order to make Ohio more competitive than Texas.

On the Hillsdale remark, Snopes verified the footage against video posted by Hillsdale College and by Ramaswamy’s own YouTube account, confirmed the quote was correctly attributed, and found that the line appeared to be a joke, based on his delivery and the laughter from the crowd. Ohio Republican Party Chair Alex Triantafilou made the same argument when HuffPost asked him about it. “These kinds of out-of-context ‘gotcha’ clips aren’t going to decide the race in Ohio,” he said. “One line from one speech used out of context won’t decide this race. Ideas will. Vivek is a man of ideas for the future of Ohio.”

The part that has no context defense

The Hillsdale line was a joke. The December post was not.

It was written down, at length, deliberately, by a man who was then co-chairing a federal cost-cutting effort and who is now asking Ohioans to hand him their state. It says that when American companies pass over American engineers, the fault lies in the culture those engineers grew up in — the prom queens, the jocks, the tolerance for normalcy. It was aimed at the whole country, which means it was aimed at the 11.8 million people whose votes he is now seeking.

Ohio votes Nov. 3.