Vivek Ramaswamy has a test for whether someone is fit to run Ohio.

"If you certainly are not willing to debate then you certainly can't lead the state," he said on Fox News last week, after Democratic nominee Amy Acton declined his invitations to debate. In a Statehouse News Bureau interview on Thursday he called debates "a basic part of the job interview" and said Acton should "show up."

Earlier this year, when Ramaswamy was the overwhelming favorite in Ohio's Republican primary, a Republican named Casey Putsch was asking him for exactly that.

"Debate me," Putsch said in one public challenge. He went on to campaign on the line: "Vivek won't debate me."

There was no Republican gubernatorial debate. Putsch got nearly 18 percent of the primary vote anyway, TiffinOhio.net reported.

Putsch was on the ballot

This matters because the usual excuse does not apply. Putsch was not a write-in or a protest candidate. He qualified for the Republican gubernatorial primary ballot alongside Ramaswamy and Heather Hill, and official Republican ballots listed all three tickets.

Nearly one in five Republican primary voters picked him over a candidate with a national profile and, by then, tens of millions of dollars behind him. Ramaswamy never debated him.

He had a rule about this in 2023

Three years ago, Ramaswamy was the one demanding that a frontrunner show up.

In May 2023, with Donald Trump weighing whether to skip the Republican presidential primary debates, Ramaswamy told Fox News Radio's Guy Benson Show: "I think it would be fundamentally uncourageous for Donald Trump to refuse to debate." Republicans, he said, "should be unafraid of open debate," and he was not going to let Trump "get away with that very easily."

Then Trump skipped the first debate. By August, Ramaswamy told CNN he had "no issue" with Trump missing the first couple, though he would object if Trump sat out the whole season.

So the standard has now moved three times. Skipping debates is uncourageous when Trump considers it. It is acceptable when Trump does it. It is disqualifying when Amy Acton does it. And it was not worth discussing when Casey Putsch asked.

There is a third candidate still waiting

Libertarian nominee Don Kissick has also been asking. He posted video of himself putting the question to Ramaswamy after an Ohio Conference of Teamsters event, and says he is "still waiting" for a commitment from either major-party candidate.

Ramaswamy has accepted invitations from CNN and Cincinnati's WLWT. He framed them as a two-man affair: "Ohioans deserve a substantive debate between their two candidates for Governor. I challenge Amy Acton to join me on the debate stage." Kissick and his running mate James Mills say they feel left out of the conversation — "Ohio voters deserve to hear from every candidate who earned a place on the November ballot," Mills said.

The standard, in other words, applies to the opponent Ramaswamy wants on a stage and to nobody else.

Why Acton says no

Acton's campaign has not argued debates are unimportant. It says the volume and content of the attacks aimed at her make sharing a stage counterproductive. Her campaign manager, Phil Stein, said Ramaswamy and allied groups have spent more than $50 million on attack ads.

Independent newsrooms have found real problems in those ads. PolitiFact rated Ramaswamy's claim that Acton "called off" Ohio's 2020 primary "Mostly False," noting that Republican Governor Mike DeWine has repeatedly said the decision was his. The Cincinnati Enquirer found that an ad blaming Acton for the isolation and death of a Republican activist's mother concerned a woman who lived in Kentucky and died after Ohio's stay-at-home order had ended and after Acton had left her state post.

University of Akron political scientist David Cohen calls Acton's decision "political malpractice," and voters are entitled to weigh that. The League of Women Voters of Ohio has taken no position on either candidate — its director, Jen Miller, said only that the league encourages "every political candidate in Ohio to participate in nonpartisan candidate events." None of it changes what Ramaswamy did when the request pointed at him.

The other questions he won't answer

Refusing debates is one item in a longer list. Cleveland.com has described this governor's race as having "a transparency problem" centered on Ramaswamy: he did not provide a position when the outlet surveyed candidates on marijuana policy, and did not answer on expanding online gambling either.

That gambling question followed him into September. Asked directly last week, after a reporter noted the industry money behind his campaign, he said only that he would "take a fresh look and a fresh perspective to this whole discussion." The Sports Betting Alliance has given $650,000 to the super PAC working to elect him.

For months before that, he would not tell Ohio where he stood on the state's most pressing issues — he ran attack ads until cleveland.com badgered a platform out of him.

What the record shows

Vivek Ramaswamy says a candidate unwilling to debate "can't lead the state." He never debated Casey Putsch, the Republican who won nearly 18 percent of Ohio's GOP gubernatorial primary vote against him, and Ohio had no Republican gubernatorial debate at all. The Libertarian nominee says he is still waiting for an answer. In 2023 Ramaswamy called it "fundamentally uncourageous" for a frontrunner to duck debates, then dropped the objection once the frontrunner was Donald Trump.

Source

Ramaswamy refused to debate his GOP challenger. Now he says candidates who won't debate 'can't lead.' by Bonnie Lucas, TiffinOhio.net, September 5, 2026. Photo: YouTube, via TiffinOhio.net.