Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy responded to NBC News’s report that he is an unaffiliated voter while speaking with Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday, saying he is “not a party man” and that for years, he found presidential candidates from both parties “deeply uninspiring.”
Ramaswamy, who a J.L. Partners/Daily Mail poll found as the winner of Wednesday’s debate, told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle he is “not going to pretend to be something I’m not.”
“The reality is, I voted libertarian in 2004 in my first election when I was 19 years old because I didn’t like George Bush or John Kerry,” he explained. “I found them both deeply uninspiring, and I also found John McCain and Barack Obama deeply uninspiring. I found Mitt Romney and Barack Obama deeply uninspiring. And so, like I said, I’m not a party man. I’m using the Republican Party as a vehicle to advance a pro-American, America First agenda, taking that to the next level, and I don’t make bones about that.”
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In Franklin County, Ohio, where Ramaswamy resides, he is listed as an “unaffiliated voter,” per NBC News. Citing Reuters, the outlet noted that Ramaswamy did not vote in 2008, 2012, or 2016. The candidate told Boyle on Saturday that he “can understand why young people are so badly disaffected by professional politicians; many of them were on that stage last [sic] night.”
“Young people aren’t inspired by people who just offer practiced partisan slogans against the radical Biden agenda,” he continued. “I mean, I railed against Biden too, but we have to offer our own vision, and that’s what I bring to the table, and I think that that’s what’s different. I think I get why young people are disaffected.”
Ramaswamy, who is 38 years old and is the youngest Republican to ever run for president, highlighted a number of events over the past two and a half decades in which he believes the American government “has systematically lied” to the American people, damaging younger voters’ trust in political leaders.
“I grew up into a generation where the government has systematically lied to us about Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11, about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about the basis for the 2008 bailout, about Donald Trump’s Russia collusion hoax — which was a lie that they made up — about the Hunter Biden laptop, about the origin of COVID, about really everything that we have seen of a major importance,” he said, also pointing to “vaccine mandates” and the “manifesto of that transgender shooter in Nashville.”
“One after another, the government just does not trust the people with the truth, and that is what young people can sense and were badly disaffected from politics for that reason,” he said. “So that was me through most of my 20s…and I understand it, but I stand for a better solution by actually offering leadership that’s authentic, that speaks to truth, and that speaks to a vision for this country.”
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Eastern.