On Monday morning, as Vivek Ramaswamy was soft-launching his campaign for governor of Ohio, Dan Merenoff sat at a coffee-shop counter in Delaware, a suburb of Columbus, weighing the prospect of Mr. Ramaswamy, a political celebrity but a governing novice, running the state.
“I like his views,” said Mr. Merenoff, 44, an operations manager for a pallet company. But he also liked Mr. Trump, and was not sure what to make of Mr. Ramaswamy’s exit from Mr. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency task force two weeks earlier.
“I’d still like to read a little bit more, because he was backed by Trump for a little bit, and then all of a sudden that changed gears,” he said.
Mr. Ramaswamy, 39, is expected to formally announce his campaign for governor late this month, according to a spokesman, a move that follows a brief appointment to the second Trump administration that ended before Inauguration Day. He has never occupied a government office in Ohio, or even run for one. He moved his investment firm out of the state, to Texas, last year.
Still, as long as Mr. Ramaswamy is a Trump ally in good standing, he appears to have a leg up.
To many Ohioans, he needs no introduction after two years of dogged scrambling across the landscape of Republican politics, a blur of Fox News hits and county committee meet-and-greets that has made him one of the party’s most visible figures.
“There’s a lot of momentum behind him,” said Barbara Orange, the executive chairwoman of the Lucas County Republican Party.
