With some polls showing he trails his Democratic opponent by double digits, Wired analyst Hugo Lowell claimed Republican Vivek Ramaswamy is “desperate” to invigorate his moribund campaign for governor.
That would explain his high profile — and highly controversial ad — featuring the mother of his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, the political analyst detailed on MS NOW on Wednesday morning.
Speaking with host Stephanie Ruhle, Swan was asked about the ad that has both Democrats and Republicans “recoiling.”
“There's an ad that Ramaswamy put out," Ruhle prompted her guest. “In the ad, Acton's birth mother accuses her, Acton, of lying about her past. Since this ad came out, Acton's brother came out and said that he and his sister were estranged from their mother because she stayed married to their stepdad after he was accused of sexually assaulting Amy as a child. Despite massive bipartisan backlash about just over how reprehensible, awful, disgusting this is, Ramaswamy is actually doubling down and paying millions of dollars to air this ad.”
“Can you just weigh in on this, Hugo?” the MS NOW host asked.
“Yeah, maybe the last gasp of a desperate man,” he agreed. “I mean, there are Republican operatives in Washington who were astounded that this was the tack that the Ramaswamy campaign took.”
“I mean, the optics of it are just really bad,” he continued. “And, you know, it's very clear that even Republican operatives think it is a bad idea to be hitting the mom, that was basically abandon her child. And the optics are so bad that Republicans don't want to come out and defend.”
“You see, some people in [Donald ] Trump's orbit say, ‘You know, maybe, maybe it's okay. There are questions that we need to be asked,’ but there is no full-throated defense of this ad that in a way that you might typically see, which I think tells you all you need to know,” he elaborated. “I mean, Ramaswamy is trailing double-digit points at this, at this, at this stage in the campaign cycle,” he pointed out.
“So I'm not particularly surprised that they're trying to throw everything at the wall. But when it's basically being disavowed in private by kind of your own party, that's just a really bad place to be.”