Most presidential candidates publish a hagiographic autobiography tying the personal challenges they’ve overcome to their policy goals and vision for the country. Vivek Ramaswamy’s Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn’t Vote For, released in April of this year, contains almost no information about who he is and fails to mention that he is running for president. Instead, the 240-page book mainly deals with contemporary issues in corporate governance law which are hard to imagine fitting neatly into a stump speech.

But then, Ramaswamy is an unusual presidential candidate running a strange campaign. He appears to be borrowing the strategy pioneered by the likes of Andrew Yang and Pete Buttigieg four years prior: project an image as a whiz-kid outsider, say yes to every media request, and support policies popular with the party base but ludicrous to policymakers. This strategy is serving him well; a recent poll put Ramaswamy in second place at 13 percent of the vote, ahead of household names like Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley.

Buttigieg leveraged his long-shot campaign into a cabinet position, and Yang very nearly became mayor of New York. Where will Vivek Ramaswamy be in four years? If a Republican wins the White House, Capitalist Punishment seems to suggest Ramaswamy has his eyes set on an influential position at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or perhaps in the Department of Energy. Should his star continue to rise, Ramaswamy may be among the favorites for the nomination in 2028.