Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will turn the tables on CNN and his opponents, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC), during Wednesday night’s debate by running an ad during the program in all Iowa markets encouraging viewers to turn it off.
In the 30-second ad, Ramaswamy, whose campaign contended CNN was “cherry-picking” polls when it came to who qualified for the debate, accuses the mainstream media of attempting to “rig the Iowa GOP Caucus in favor of the corporate candidates who they can control.”
“Don’t fall for the trick. They don’t want you to hear from me the truth about what happened on January 6, the truth about the COVID origin, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and everything that they have lied to you about. So you can fix that: Take your remote and turn this off,” he added, with a beep mimicking an expletive at the end of the commercial.
Ramaswamy will also counterprogram the event, as Breitbart News first reported, joining podcaster Tim Pool and conservative commentator Candace Owens. Pool and Owens will appear with Ramaswamy for a live audience town hall event on Pool’s show, Timcast. It will kick off at 8:00 p.m. ET in Des Moines, Iowa.
Following Wednesday’s podcast, the candidate will hit the trail with Owens on Thursday before he hits four stops with YouTuber and boxer Jake Paul on Sunday.
The ad comes as mainstream media outlets made buzz over the campaign’s halting of television ad buys in late December as it embraced more targeted and direct means to reach voters through phone calls, door-knocking, text messages, email, and more.
Speaking with Breitbart News, Ramaswamy’s campaign CEO, Ben Yoho, explained that the campaign is not slowing spending; rather, it is merely relocating those TV funds into other areas because a combined $93.8 million in TV spending between all candidates in Iowa alone to that point had caused little difference in the contours of the race.
“All we’ve done is reallocated the money we had budgeted for broadcast and cable to those higher [return-on-investment] tactics that we’ve found to get our voters out, which allows us to do a lot more of it because they are cheaper things, like addressable advertising is significantly cheaper than broadcast advertising,” Yoho said.
At least for an evening, the campaign is re-embracing the TV ad strategy.