Aug. 27 — Ohio’s future prosperity will require three imperatives, gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy told an Ohio Chamber forum at Wright State University — reform of education, ensuring energy abundance and reversing relatively flat growth trendlines in the state’s population.
Ohio has 11 million residents “and declining,” Cincinnati native Ramaswamy told an audience at Wright State’s Student Union.
“We’ll be 15 million and growing by the time I’m done as governor,” the former 2024 presidential candidate said Tuesday in what was billed as his first major policy speech in the Dayton area.
Next year will be a crucial year politically, with midterm elections scheduled and every Ohio statewide officeholder term-limited. The chamber forum sought to lift the curtain on what’s at stake in Ohio.
Ramaswamy, 40, appeared as the keynote speaker for the five-hour forum. His likely Democratic challenger, former Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton, did not appear and was not on the event’s agenda.
Ohio’s population reached just under 11.8 million in the 2020 U.S. Census, showing a 2.3% growth rate that lagged the national 7.4% pace of growth.
Ramaswamy said he wants to reverse that by keeping young people in Ohio. Controlling for immigration, more people leave Ohio than move in, he said. And those leaving tend to be younger and college-educated, he added.
“We’re mostly headed in the right direction; we just need to step on the gas — literally and metaphorically,” he said.
Ramaswamy seeks the Republican nomination in the governor’s race. He has the endorsement of the statewide Republican party, while Acton is the only publicly declared Democrat running at the moment.
The state’s primary is May 5, 2026; the general election will be Nov. 3.
Electricity costs generally are about 50% higher this summer and are on track to jump another 50% next year, Ramaswamy said. He attributed that, in part, to growing demand from AI data centers and economic growth, coupled with a paring back of baseload coal and gas-fired power sources.
“We’ve got to turn that around and produce more energy,” he said. He called for speeding the permitting of new power sources and a look at the construction of small, modular nuclear power reactors, a source that is growing nationally. The Department of Energy aired a plan last year to add 35 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity by 2035.
To reverse population decline, he promised to “create programs that create hard incentives for young people to remain in or migrate into the state, to be able to power our workforce.”
He added that he was “avoiding the temptation to get into details” on that idea Tuesday.
But in his hourlong address, he spent plenty of time on education reform, both in some 20 minutes of introductory remarks and in about 40 minutes of taking questions.
He said average American students generally are four years behind average Chinese students. He called for the application of exacting standards, requiring third-graders to be literate before moving on to the fourth grade, for example — making the milestone transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”
He said he also wanted to move past what he called the “tired debates” around whether or not to simply spend more on education, focusing anew on how and where education dollars are spent.
“We have to aspire to more than just showing up,” he said. “We have to aspire to excellence.”
Ramaswamy graduated from St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati before going on to Harvard and Yale Law School, starting Roivant Sciences, a biopharmaceutical business, and launching several subsidiary businesses.
He dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination early in 2024 after finishing fourth in the Iowa caucuses. On dropping out, he endorsed Donald Trump, who went on to win a second term that November.
Heather Hill, a former Morgan County School Board president, also seeks the GOP nomination in the governor’s race. She did not appear at the chamber event.
Dave Yost, Ohio’s attorney general, dropped out of the race to succeed Gov. Mike DeWine, who cannot seek another term due to term limits.
Questions were sent to a representative of Acton’s campaign. If the campaign responds, this story will be updated.
