Vivek Ramaswamy cancels TV ads ahead of GOP’s kickoff nominating contests

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Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has canceled all spending on TV ads with just weeks until the first caucuses in Iowa and primary in New Hampshire.

The exit from the TV ad wars doesn’t bode well for a presidential campaign, but Mr. Ramaswamy said he was not dropping out of the race.

The biotech entrepreneur said his campaign was merely switching gears to spend more energy and money on other efforts.

Still, former President Donald Trump took the announcement as a sign he would soon get an endorsement from Mr. Ramaswamy.

“He will, I am sure, Endorse me. But Vivek is a good man, and is not done yet!” Mr. Trump, the prohibitive favorite in the GOP presidential race, wrote on Truth Social.

Ramaswamy campaign spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said the new ad strategy was an innovative move in the race, not a retreat from the competition.
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“We are focused on bringing out the voters we’ve identified — best way to reach them is using addressable advertising, mail, text, live calls, and doors to communicate with our voters on Vivek’s vision for America, making their plan to caucus and turning them out,” she told The Washington Times.
“As you know, this isn’t what most campaigns look like. We have intentionally structured this way so that we have the ability to be nimble and hyper-targeted in our ad spending,” she said.

GOP strategist Chip Felkel said it was the right decision for a campaign mired in single digits in the polls. But he said it shows Mr. Ramaswamy has retained some of his business skills and understands ROI or return on investment.

“Ramaswamy got here because he was a successful businessman who could afford to fund a campaign and that’s a campaign that has been locked in single digits since day one,” Mr. Felkel said. “If he’s as good a businessman as people seem to think he was or is, he’s not getting a very good ROI on that money. So it would only make sense to save some cash if you didn’t need to spend it and it wasn’t going to be spent well.”

“Politically, it’s probably overdue,” he said.

Mr. Ramaswamy’s campaign announced in November that it planned to spend more than $10 million on ads in Iowa and New Hampshire, including broadcast, cable, radio, mail and digital. According to AdImpact, the campaign spent $2.2 million on TV, digital and radio ads since that announcement.

“Presidential TV ad spending is idiotic, low-ROI & a trick that political consultants use to bamboozle candidates who suffer from low IQ,” Mr. Ramaswamy said on X Tuesday. “We’re doing it differently. Spending $$ in a way that follows data … apparently a crazy idea in US politics.”

“Big surprise coming on Jan. 15,” he said, referring to the day of the Iowa caucus.

According to the political statistics website FiveThirtyEight’s average of recent national polls, Mr. Ramaswamy comes fourth behind Mr. Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.