Ramaswamy camp: The RNC sabotaged us in the debate spin room

Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign accused Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel of trying to limit his campaign’s visibility in the post debate spin room, following critical remarks he made of her at the forum.

Tricia McLaughlin, Ramaswamy’s senior adviser, told POLITICO that when the Ramaswamy camp entered the spin room in Miami Wednesday evening, the candidate found himself surrounded initially by reporters. But as they searched for his “spinner stick”— a placard typically held high by a young RNC staffer so that it's visible to journalists—they couldn’t find one.

Eventually, they discovered what appeared to be an abandoned Ramaswamy sign lying in a corner of the room, and no RNC staffer there to help.

Ramaswamy’s bodyman, Patrick McFeeley, eventually picked up the sign himself, after NBC pointed it out to them.

The campaign took the episode as a sign of retribution for the candidate’s sharp dressing down of McDaniel in the opening moments of the debate. The biotech entrepreneur called on the RNC chairwoman to resign for losses the party had experienced in successive elections.

“We’ve become a party of losers,” Ramaswamy said.

“It would be incredibly ironic if the one candidate who's called on the RNC woman to resign suddenly was missing his sign commandeer, and the sign was abandoned in the corner,” McLaughlin said.

The post debate spin room often is a chaotic setting, with dozens of journalists swarming an open room trying to grab quotes from surrogates and even the candidates themselves. The signs allow those journalists to know where to go and with whom they are talking.

Among the people in the room on Tuesday alongside the surrogates and the journalists were officials with the RNC and employees of the host network, NBC.

A person close to the debate planning told POLITICO that it was the RNC’s responsibility, not NBC or the arena staffers’ job, to print the signs and have staff hold them. This person added that there is no precedent for a network to provide spin room staffing for a campaign. The Ramaswamy campaign asked NBC what happened, and the network referred them to the RNC.

NBC declined to comment.

Ramaswamy appeared to have a tense exchange with McDaniel after the debate was over. And he continued his diatribe against her on X on Thursday, hitting back on her claims that he voted for Barack Obama.

After publication, an RNC spokesperson told POLITICO the person Ramaswamy was talking to after the debate wasn’t McDaniel.

“The RNC provides spin room signs for all candidates, as we did for Vivek,” an RNC spokesperson told POLITICO after publication, and after initially declining to comment. “We were never asked by his campaign for help to hold his sign. His sign was in the spin room, and he had 7 credentials to use as he pleased, including for somebody to hold his campaign sign.”