Did Ohio Democrat Amy Acton spread a fake video of Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy advocating year-round school, as social media posts claim? No, that's not true: Four days into the controversy over year-round school, the Ramaswamy campaign had not publicly stated the video was fake and declined to answer questions from Lead Stories. The Columbus Dispatch quoted an un-named Ramaswamy staffer saying Ramaswamy floated the idea in casual conversation, but made no formal proposal to add hours and days to the school year. There's no obvious sign of AI fakery in the clip. The Ramaswamy campaign appears to have taken down its version of the clip and replaced it with a shortened version that no longer contains the controversial bit. Multiple jump cuts in the original and replacement video show both were edited and not one continuous shot.
The fakery claim appeared in a November 25, 2025 X post (archived here) on the @timcast account, with accompanying text that said "If we are playing this game, we are done." It continued:
A Democrat candidate circulated a fake AI video of Vivek Ramaswamy promoting something he never said.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time this fact check was written:
(
In his post, podcaster Tim Pool asserts the original audio was replaced with fake audio, but offers no evidence of such a switch. In the clip posted by Acton, the audio and lip movements sync and there is none of the smearing or distortion of the mouth often found when text-to-video tools take real video and morph it into whatever the AI operator wants a face to say.
Here's the excerpt Acton posted (archived here):
.@VivekGRamaswamy's plan for year-round school pic.twitter.com/y3FF8UJvWS
-- Dr. Amy Acton (@amyactonoh) November 25, 2025
In the clip posted by Acton, Ramaswamy says:
Make parenting more affordable by making school year-round and going 'til 4 o'clock instead of 3 o'clock so you don't have to pay for childcare.
The Columbus Dispatch, covering the claims by Ramaswamy supporters that Acton had posted a fake video, found the original Ramaswamy campaign video included those remarks, but that that the campaign took down the original version of the video and replaced it with a shorter version that left off the segment in which he talked about year-round school. Lead Stories has found no archived version of the Ramaswamy campaign's original version, although Acton and others saved it to use in criticizing him.
An unnamed Ramaswamy campaign spokesperson was quoted saying to the Dispatch that Ramaswamy's remarks were: "casual back-and-forth on TikTok" but not a "policy rollout."
In the last version of the Nov. 25 Ramaswamy campaign TikTok post titled "How to ACTUALLY make life affordable", there are abrupt transitions (called "jump cuts) that show material was either changed, added or removed by the Ramaswamy campaign at 00:00:03; at 00:00:05, 00:00:15 and 00:00:18 and 00:00:23. In the first example, for instance, there's an abrupt zoom in on his face, followed two seconds later by an abrupt zoom out.
Lead Stories reached out to the Ramaswamy campaign for comment at 1:51 p.m. on Nov. 26 and again later in the day. Lead Stories contacted Ramaswamy's campaign again on November 28, but the campaign did not take the opportunity to take responsibility for the year-round-school clip, nor to call it fake. This fact check will be updated if the campaign responds to address the claim of video fakery.
