Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign removed a batting-cage video from Instagram after it drew widespread online mockery on Wednesday, although the clip remained available on the Republican candidate’s TikTok account as of September 10. Ramaswamy’s brief campaign stunt has become an unwelcome distraction in one of the country’s closest gubernatorial contests. One clip of the batting cage video, posted by CNN senior politics reporter Andrew Kaczynski, had been viewed more than 3.2 million times on social media platform X at the time of writing.
Ohio voters are choosing between Ramaswamy, who has been endorsed by President Donald Trump, and Democrat Amy Acton, with recent surveys showing neither candidate holding a decisive advantage. Newsweek contacted Ramaswamy’s campaign for comment via email on Thursday morning and is awaiting a response. Ramaswamy intended the video to package a list of policy commitments in an upbeat, accessible format, but discussion quickly shifted from those proposals to the staging and editing.
The video's removal now gives opponents and commentators an opening to question the campaign’s political judgment while the race remains closely divided. The video showed Ramaswamy inside a batting cage promising "10 things" that would be done for Ohio as pitches arrived from a machine. Each pledge was paired with a swing.
It is a format the Republican has used before in campaign video material, with a previous TikTok clip still available on his verified account showing him delivering the same 10-point pitch while throwing darts at balloons at a fairground game. A tennis version also remained available on both Instagram and TikTok as of September 10, showing Ramaswamy delivering the policy pitch between shots on an outdoor court. However, his latest batting cage stunt drew mockery online, with viewers circulating clips criticizing the candidate’s technique.
Journalists, strategists and other political figures joined the reaction across X, TikTok and Instagram, turning the campaign’s visual metaphor into the central point of discussion. Reacting to the clip in a short rebuttal video, Democratic U.S. Representative Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania wrote on X: "If we don’t do something about Vivek Ramaswamy’s private equity friends jacking up the cost of youth sports, American kids will grow up thinking that’s how you hit a baseball." "My toddler has better swing mechanics than Vivek Ramaswamy," posted X user Mike Coté.
"Ramaswamy is a very solid tennis player, and this ad would have worked perfectly well with him hitting tennis shots," The Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki wrote. "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." The clip had disappeared from Ramaswamy’s official Instagram accounts by Wednesday evening but remained live on TikTok. No direct explanation from the campaign for its removal has been given.
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