‘Uncoordinated 6-Yr-Old’: Vivek Ramaswamy Roasted by Critics for Baseball Swing in Awkward Campaign Video
Screenshot via @vivekgramaswamy on Instagram
Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy got roasted online after posting a campaign video of himself taking swings in a batting cage — with critics mercilessly mocking what one described as his “atrocious” form.
The video, shared on Ramaswamy’s TikTok and Instagram on Tuesday, features the candidate sharing “ten things I’m gonna do for Ohio.” After each pledge, Ramaswamy swung at a ball fed through an automatic pitching machine.
As James Surowiecki, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, pointed out on X, “Ramaswamy is a very solid tennis player, and this ad would have worked perfectly well with him hitting tennis shots. But I guess they assumed tennis would look too fancy, so instead they had him swing a bat, even though he does it like an uncoordinated 6-yr-old.”
Notably, the Republican candidate’s social media pages do indeed contain a version of this ad — tennis style.
David Pepper, the Democratic lieutenant governor candidate running alongside Ohio gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton, capitalized on the moment politically, writing on X, “If you think Vivek’s baseball swing is atrocious, wait til you see the disturbing way he first made his millions…”
Here, Pepper was referencing Ramaswamy’s early biotech career. In 2014, his company Axovant Sciences acquired the rights to an experimental Alzheimer’s drug from GlaxoSmithKline for $5 million. Ramaswamy rebranded the drug as RVT-101 and took Axovant public the following year, raising $315 million in what was then the largest U.S. biotech IPO — before the company had recruited a single patient for its planned trial.
Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA), who recently announced that he was considering a run against Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) in the 2028 Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, also used the clip to make a political statement, adding on X, “If we don’t do something about @VivekGRamaswamy’s private equity friends jacking up the cost of youth sports, American kids will grow up thinking that’s how you hit a baseball.”
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