Vivek Ramaswamy is very annoying. It’s why he’s surging in the polls.

NEW YORK – Of all the descriptors attached to

Mr Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old political tyro

enjoying a bizarre surge in the Republican primary race for second place, the most common one seems to be “annoying”.

After

the Republican presidential primary debate

on Wednesday, a Politico headline quoted a party strategist about Mr Ramaswamy’s performance: “It just got to be annoying.”

In a widely shared essay, writer Josh Barro, a Harvard contemporary of Mr Ramaswamy’s, probed the quality that “makes Vivek so annoying”.

In a column, CNN’s Ms S. E. Cupp called him: “Obnoxious. Annoying. Disrespectful. Inexperienced. Conspiratorial.”

Mr Matt Lewis, an anti-Donald Trump conservative writer for The Daily Beast, marvelled that there are some who actually like Mr Ramaswamy’s cocky, know-it-all persona.

The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight and Ipsos polled likely Republican primary voters before and after last week’s debate. After his performance, Mr Ramaswamy’s favorability rating rose, to 60 per cent from 50 per cent, even though his unfavourability rating rose even more, to 32 per cent from 13 per cent.

Participants in a CNN focus group of Iowa Republicans declared him the debate’s winner, as did a poll released on Thursday from JL Partners.

The day after the debate, his campaign reportedly raised more than US$1 million (S$1.35 million).

The question is what Mr Ramaswamy’s supporters see in this irksome figure.

Some Republicans, clearly, appreciate the way he sucks up to Trump, whom Mr Ramaswamy has called “the best president of the 21st century”.

But that doesn’t explain the roughly 10 per cent of Republicans who tell pollsters they’re planning to vote for Mr Ramaswamy instead of Trump.

It cannot only be his shtick as Fox News’ “woke and cancel-culture guru”, as one anchor called him, since at this point even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has learnt that railing against wokeness is a losing message.

Nor is Mr Ramaswamy’s appeal tailored to the downwardly mobile Trump voters who appreciated the former president’s pledges to protect their entitlements, since his promise to “dismantle Lyndon Johnson’s failed ‘Great Society’” makes former United States House Speaker Paul Ryan look like a social democrat.

Instead, I suspect that Mr Ramaswamy’s fans are drawn to him for all the reasons his critics find him insufferable.

Conservatives love being championed by representatives of groups that they think disdain them.

Despite the right’s deep resentment of the entertainment industry, Republicans tend to adore celebrity candidates, from former president Ronald Reagan to former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Donald Trump.

Think of the infamous tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” (They deleted it once rapper Kanye West’s right turn veered into outright Hitler fandom.)

At Democratic conventions, I have seen famous actors walk around either unrecognised or ignored, while at Republican conventions C-listers are feted like superstars.

Mr Ramaswamy, too, is a performer, but what he is performing is a parody of meritocratic excellence.

If you have spent time around entitled Ivy League grads, you probably recognise him as an exaggerated version of a familiar type: the callow and condescending nerd who assumes that skill in one field translates to aptitude in all others.

But to his fans, the very fact that he is such a pure product of elite institutions – in addition to Harvard, he went to Yale Law and made his fortune with a biotech start-up he ran from Manhattan – probably gives him extra oomph as a class traitor.

People who care about the basic workings of government are gobsmacked by Mr Ramaswamy’s apparent ignorance – on Sunday, for example, he said that if he had been in Vice-President Mike Pence’s shoes on Jan 6, 2021, he would have pushed through election reform “in my capacity as president of the Senate”.

But he is good at sounding like he knows what he is talking about.

Ms Sarah Longwell, a political strategist who has conducted extensive focus groups with Republican primary voters, said people who like Mr Ramaswamy inevitably say: “I think he’s really smart.”

That is why former New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s comparison of Mr Ramaswamy to former president Barack Obama, whom conservatives saw as a smug, smooth-talking foreign interloper, fell flat.

Mr Ramaswamy’s very superficial similarities to Mr Obama work for him, giving conservative audiences the satisfaction of hearing their resentments affirmed by a defector from the culture of the coastal gentry.

At the debate, Mr Ramaswamy encouraged the analogy when he ripped off an old Obama line to introduce himself as a “skinny guy with a funny last name”.

Ms Longwell does not think Mr Ramaswamy has a shot at beating Trump for the nomination, but, she said: “I think that Republicans want their own Obama.”

Many older white conservatives, after all, feel threatened by multi-ethnic younger generations that largely reject their most fundamental values about faith, gender and patriotism.

Mr Ramaswamy is part of this menacing cohort, and he is telling Republicans that their suspicions about it are correct.

“More than anything, he has portrayed his generation and younger ones as empty souls living meaningless lives,” Mr Jonathan Weisman wrote in The New York Times.

He is a young man running an anti-youth campaign; a centrepiece of Mr Ramaswamy’s platform is a call to strip the franchise from most people under 25 unless they pass a civics test.

He is also a person of colour who argues, even in the wake of another white supremacist mass shooting, that most American racism comes from the left.

If he annoys those who find him most familiar, that is surely part of the point. NYTIMES