Nick Fuentes Backs Acton to Stop a Cincinnati-Born Republican

The Groyper Movement’s Leader Wants Ohio Republicans to Elect Amy Acton

Nick Fuentes calls it a protest vote, and his own words say what he’s protesting

On Oct. 8, two days after early voting opened, the Groyper movement’s leader posted to his roughly 1.3 million followers on X: “Early voting has begun in Ohio. VOTE AMY ACTON FOR GOVERNOR.” You’d expect a far-right livestreamer to want a Republican in the governor’s office. Nick Fuentes doesn’t. He wants Vivek Ramaswamy, the Cincinnati-born Republican nominee, to lose, and he has said why.

The answer has little to do with taxes, schools or anything else an Ohio governor controls. It has a lot to do with where Ramaswamy’s parents were born. The Exchange already weighed the case for conservatives sitting out November. Fuentes raises a different question: what does he want from Ohio Republicans, and is there any evidence his followers can deliver it?

What Fuentes Says the Groyper Movement Wants

Fuentes declared the race his priority last December. “We have to deny Vivek Ramaswamy the governorship,” he said on a livestream, calling Ohio the only 2026 race he cared about, Fox News reported. On a podcast that month, he went further. “This anchor baby cannot become the governor of Ohio, I don’t care if it’s a Jewish woman who wins,” he said, according to the New York Post.

The same report quoted his reason. Electing Ramaswamy, Fuentes argued, “sends a message that you can say and do anything to white people.” That’s the motive in his own words. It isn’t a complaint about Ramaswamy’s record. It’s a claim that an American born in Cincinnati shouldn’t govern Ohio because of his ancestry.

By May, the instruction had become a vote for the Democrat. “We’re going to have to hold our noses and we’re going to have to vote Democrat,” Fuentes said, according to NBC4 in Columbus. On a May 6 broadcast, he called it “a protest vote” and said, “I am not a Democrat,” the Lorain Daily reported, citing an automated transcript. His follow-up post on the night of Oct. 9 read: “I BELIEVE THAT SHE WILL WIN / VOTE AMY ACTON FOR OHIO / RETIRE ANCHOR BABY VIVEK.”

Put those statements together and you get three motives stacked on top of each other. The first is ancestry, stated plainly. The second is punishment: a loss to show Republican leaders what happens when they nominate someone Fuentes rejects. The third is leverage. A narrow Acton win would let Fuentes claim he decided an Ohio election, whether or not his followers moved a single vote. That last reading is the Exchange’s interpretation, not something Fuentes has said.

The Argument Reached an Anderson Township Town Hall

The Groyper movement’s argument isn’t only an online fight. On May 1, Ramaswamy held a town hall at American Legion Anderson Post 318 on Clough Pike. At that town hall, a man asked him why he should support a non-Christian, The Washington Post reported in May. Ramaswamy asked the man to name the Ten Commandments, then recited them himself. “This is my St. X education here,” he said.

Landon Thompson, a 19-year-old supporter of primary challenger Casey Putsch who came from Northern Kentucky, told the Post that Ramaswamy hadn’t “integrated” because he is Hindu. Ohio Republican Party Chairman Alex Triantafilou offered a different read on the whole phenomenon. “These people live off of the oxygen that we give them,” he told the Post.

That points to a fourth motive worth taking seriously: attention. Attention also pays. Since the start of 2025, roughly 11,000 donors sent Fuentes nearly $900,000 in on-screen “superchat” donations during his livestreams, a Washington Post analysis found in April. That doesn’t prove money drives the Acton endorsement. It does show that controversy feeds an audience, and the audience pays.

Acton Is Jewish. Fuentes Backs Her Anyway.

Acton is Jewish and has talked publicly about her faith, including to the Cleveland Jewish News. That should be a problem for Fuentes. The Anti-Defamation League calls him a white supremacist and has documented him praising Hitler. The Groyper movement has spent years complaining about Jewish influence.

People usually describe that as a contradiction. Fuentes resolved it out loud in December: he doesn’t care if “a Jewish woman” wins, as long as Ramaswamy loses. In this race, by his own account, keeping an Indian American Republican out of office matters more to Fuentes than his long record of antisemitic rhetoric. Whether his followers share that ranking, or will act on it, is another question.

None of that is Acton’s doing. Nothing in the record shows she sought the endorsement or welcomed it. NBC4 reported in May that neither campaign had commented, and the Exchange found no later Acton statement about the October posts.

It Started With a Post About Mediocrity

The fight has a starting point. During the December 2024 argument over H-1B visas, Ramaswamy posted that “our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” ABC News reported. Nikki Haley pushed back, arguing for American workers first. Plenty of conservatives agreed with her, and the Exchange’s own coverage has said voters can fairly hold that post against him.

That’s a policy argument. You can oppose expanding H-1B visas, distrust tech companies that depend on them and still treat Ramaswamy as fully American. The Groyper movement took that argument somewhere else. Slurs aimed at Ramaswamy spread on X after the December 2024 post, AsAmNews reported. By this spring, his feeds were “littered with slurs” and demands that he return to India, the Post reported, though he was born in Cincinnati. Fuentes’s “anchor baby” line comes from that second camp, not the first.

Ramaswamy answered in a December 2025 New York Times guest essay. He described a view of American identity “based on lineage, blood and soil” and said the “Groyper right, a rapidly ascendant online movement,” had popularized it. People who praise Hitler, as Fuentes has, “have no place in the conservative movement,” he wrote.

Casey Putsch Courted the Groypers in May

Putsch, a car builder from northwest Ohio, gave sympathizers of the Groyper movement a ballot line in May. He “embraced followers of Fuentes,” the Post reported. He shared an image of Ramaswamy as a Hindu deity and called him an “Indian boy [who] cosplays an American.” Asked why he mocked Ramaswamy’s ethnicity and religion, Putsch said he was being “funny,” the Post reported. Fuentes, meanwhile, said he didn’t think Putsch could win.

Putsch also ran on issues unrelated to ancestry. He called data centers “only a leech” in an interview with 13abc in Toledo and called artificial intelligence “insanely dangerous” to the Ohio Capital Journal. So a Putsch vote didn’t automatically mean a Groyper vote. Most of the dozens of conservative voters the Post interviewed hadn’t even heard of him.

Since the primary, Putsch has gone further than Fuentes in one respect. On Oct. 17, he posted that he had “voted red my whole life” and would “vote straight Democrat in the midterms.” He also called Democrats “the trash destroying the social fabric of America.” The post never names Acton or Ramaswamy.

What Hamilton County’s Putsch Vote Can and Can’t Show

Followers on X aren’t voters, and most of Fuentes’s 1.3 million probably don’t live in Ohio. No public record counts how many Ohioans follow him. The May primary offers something narrower: a measure of how many Republicans chose the alternative to Ramaswamy on the ballot. Statewide, 144,184 chose Putsch, 17.6% of the two-candidate vote, according to the Associated Press’s certified totals.

In Hamilton County, Putsch got 4,791 votes, while Ramaswamy got 36,628, according to the county’s certified results. That’s 11.6%, the smallest Putsch share in any of Ohio’s 88 counties, by Exchange calculation from the AP’s county results. Warren County gave him 13.4%, Clermont 14.5% and Butler 14.8%. His best county was Seneca, home to his native Tiffin, at 30.4%. Rural Adams County gave him 30.1%, far from Tiffin.

Inside Hamilton County, the Exchange used the county’s audit file, which lists votes for all 563 precincts. Putsch got 12.6% inside the city of Cincinnati and 11.4% in the rest of the county. Anderson Township, home of that Legion post, gave him 10.2%.

One caution about the county report: it lists 43,158 votes cast, while the two named candidates total 41,419. No line on the page accounts for the other 1,739. The Ohio Secretary of State told counties in April not to count votes for the withdrawn Heather Hill ticket, and the county’s audit file leaves out the same 1,739 ballots. [EDITOR HOLD: add the Board of Elections’ written confirmation.] The Exchange’s shares count only the two candidates.

Can a Fringe Swing Ohio?

The strongest case for worrying goes like this. In a close race, a small bloc can matter. Acton led 50% to 44% among 1,000 likely voters in Bowling Green State University’s October poll, which carried a 3.95-point margin of error. Meanwhile, co/efficient, which poll aggregators classify as a Republican firm, had Ramaswamy up 2. If the final margin lands inside a point or two, every lost vote looks decisive.

But no poll has measured Fuentes’s pull, and nobody has shown that his followers vote in Ohio in meaningful numbers. Ohio State University political scientist Dominik Stecula, asked by NBC4 whether the endorsement mattered on its own, said, “Probably not.” He called Fuentes “a relatively fringe figure.” Ohio polls have also underestimated Republicans by about 5 points on average since 2014, by an earlier Exchange calculation, though past misses don’t reliably predict the next one. If Ramaswamy loses, voters’ complaints about prices, data centers or Trump would all compete with Fuentes for the credit.

Fuentes’s Oct. 8 post had passed 2.1 million views on X’s counter by Sunday. In Hamilton County, where Ramaswamy grew up, Putsch drew 4,791 primary votes in May after courting Fuentes’s followers. Those returns show how few local Republicans took that option when it cost nothing. How many will follow Fuentes to a Democrat in November remains to be seen. Early in-person voting at the Hamilton County Board of Elections on Smith Road in Norwood runs through Nov. 1.