Is this Vivek Ramaswamy's moment?

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By Philip Elliott

Washington Correspondent, TIME

Is Anyone Having More Fun Running For President Than Vivek Ramaswamy?

Programming note: While Phil is off today, the D.C. Brief is highlighting a recent story out of TIME's Washington bureau, a timely political profile from Mini Racker.

Vivek Ramaswamy is in a crowded Ford Explorer zooming through New Hampshire. It's early August, and the Republican presidential candidate is racing between campaign stops, taking questions from three reporters while strategizing with a campaign aide. At one point, the SUV shakes as his driver veers onto the highway's rumble strip, but Ramaswamy looks only momentarily startled before launching back into a response.

Every presidential candidate needs to be able to do more than one thing at a time—to walk and chew gum, hold babies and deliver speeches. But nobody in the GOP field multitasks quite like the uber-wealthy Ramaswamy, 38. He's already had a busy day, jetting from Washington—where he visited the courthouse where Donald Trump was about to be arraigned to express his outrage—to the Granite State, where he took questions at a lunchtime meet-and-greet and a backyard party. His team blanketed both events with pamphlets listing Ramaswamy’s 10 “truths.” (Among them: “there are two genders,” “human flourishing requires fossil fuels,” and “the nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.”) The first-time candidate told attendees about his plans to eliminate the Department of Education, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Internal Revenue Service. And he said he'd take “America First” even further than Trump, by pulling back on support for Ukraine and deploying troops to secure the southern border.

The everywhere-all-at-once strategy, and the former biotech tycoon's talent for presenting bomb-throwing anti-establishment sentiment in an affable package, has made him the closest thing the GOP primary has had to a breakout star. Since launching his campaign in February, Ramaswamy has been going nonstop: shaking hands in New Hampshire, rapping Eminem verses in Iowa, appearing on more than 70 podcasts and nearly every news program that will have him, and producing a stream of online content more voluminous than any of his competitors. Suddenly, Ramaswamy is running in second or third place in multiple national polls and often outperforming governors and a former vice president in the early states.

Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican pollster who regularly conducts focus groups with GOP-leaning voters, says her panelists used to bring up Florida Governor Ron DeSantis unbidden, while mentioning Ramaswamy barely at all. Now the situation has reversed. “I think that he has been running the kind of campaign that Ron DeSantis should have run,” Longwell says of Ramaswamy.

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