A biotech entrepreneur who has vowed to run the US government like Elon Musk has surged into joint second place in the race to win the Republican nomination.
Days ahead of the first candidates’ debate, Vivek Ramaswamy and Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, are now tied on 10 per cent, according to an Emerson College poll over the weekend.
Both men are 46 points behind Donald Trump, whose support shows little sign of weakening in the face of the barrage of indictments he faces.
Mr Ramaswamy has been labelled a breakout star of the primary campaign already, presenting himself as a successor to Mr Trump, and earning the former president’s approval.
But his success has come at the expense of Mr DeSantis, whose campaign has imploded.
And a leaked memo from Mr DeSantis’s Never Back Down, his political action committee, urged him to “take a sledgehammer” to Mr Ramaswamy in this week’s debate.
Such has been the impact of Mr Ramaswamy’s campaign and his aggressive attack on “woke” politics, that there is mounting speculation that he could be Mr Trump’s running mate in the 2024 election.
But over the weekend Mr Ramaswamy dismissed the idea out of hand.
“I’m not interested in a different position in the government,” he said on Fox News. “Frankly, I’d drive change through the private sector sooner than becoming number two or three in the federal government.”
Mr Ramaswamy, who is 38, also dismissed suggestions that he was too young and inexperienced to run for the White House.
“My wife and I, we reflected on this: should we wait 20 years, when our sons are out of the house when we might have some more experience?” he added.
“The truth is, I don’t think we have 20 years left as a country if we just passively stand by and watch.”
The rise of the biotech tycoon has seen the father of two eclipse seasoned politicians from South Carolina senator Tim Scott to former New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
While many of his rivals have distanced themselves from Donald Trump, Mr Ramaswamy has given full-throated support to the former president, vowing to pardon him should he be elected.
He has also vowed to run the US government like Elon Musk, bringing the tech entrepreneur’s cost-slashing approach to Washington.
“What Musk did at Twitter is a good example of what I want to do to the administrative state,” he told Fox News in a recent interview.
“Take out the 75% of the dead weight cost, improve the actual experience of what it’s supposed to do,” Mr Ramaswamy said.
Mr Musk has repaid the compliment on his social media channel. “Vivek is increasingly looking like a strong candidate,” he wrote.
While paying tribute to the Trump administration, Mr Ramaswamy has vowed to go even further.
“I respect what Donald Trump did, I do, with the America First agenda, but I think he went as far as he was going to go,” he said last week.
“I’m in this race to take the America First agenda far further than Donald Trump ever did.”
A Ramaswamy administration would abolish the Department of Education on “day one” of taking office.
He has also promised to send troops to the southern border to tackle immigration from Central America.
Mr Ramaswamy made his money in hedge funds, investing in biotech before setting up his own firm buying drug patents.
A practising Hindu, Mr Ramaswamy said he shares the same values as Christians.
“He strikes me as being in the vein of people we have seen before like Herman Cain, Andrew Yang and Donald Trump who enter the primaries from outside politics,” Christopher Galdieri, professor of politics at Saint Anselm’s College, told The Telegraph.
“Because they don’t have any record of holding office and can appeal to people who want something different.
“What usually happens, with the exception of Trump, is they can’t sustain this. Like Icarus, they fly too close to the sun and then fall back to earth.”
