With the Iowa caucuses less than a week away, candidates are blitzing the state, hoping to surprise voters around the country by overperforming there. While all eyes are on Governor DeSantis, Ambassador Nikki Haley, and President Trump, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy is quietly gaining steam in the Hawkeye State.

In recent days, Mr. Ramaswamy has enjoyed the endorsements of a few prominent state Republicans. The most high-profile of these is from Representative Steve Holt, who earlier endorsed Mr. DeSantis but switched to support Mr. Ramaswamy, saying, “I’ve been incredibly moved by Vivek’s message.”

“I struggled with this for several weeks. To be honest with you, I lost sleep over it because I don’t want to let anybody down,” Mr. Holt told the Des Moines Register. “I think Governor DeSantis is the second-best governor in the country behind Governor Reynolds.”

The momentum on the ground in Iowa appears to stem from a protest Mr. Ramaswamy attended at the Iowa capitol against a proposed carbon capture pipeline project in the state. 

Such pipelines store compressed CO2 that has been captured from industrial processes and separated from other emissions. The pipelines are used to transport the compressed gas to a storage facility.

Mr. Ramaswamy appeared at the protest alongside Mr. Holt as well as a state representative, Steve King, who also endorsed Mr. Ramaswamy this month after the candidate came out against the pipeline project. 

Although Mr. Ramaswamy is down in the polls compared to his top competitors, he’s had a good week in Iowa, with several viral moments that garnered hundreds of thousands of views on social media platforms favored by right-wing voters.

In one of the videos, Mr. Ramaswamy antagonized members of the national press corps by turning the tables and asking them a series of questions focused on topics near and dear to right-wing commentators.

“Just by a show of hands, who here is willing to admit that the Trump Russia collusion hoax was indeed incorrectly reported by the mainstream media?” Mr. Ramaswamy said at a campaign event.

Mr. Ramaswamy then asked members of the press, “By a show of hands, was the Wuhan lab the likely origin of the Covid-19 pandemic?”

Mr. Ramaswamy then touched on another key talking point for online conservatives — Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“Does anyone here agree that the Hunter Biden laptop story, as reported by the New York Post, was indeed accurately reported and was not Russian disinformation but was, in fact, a factually owned laptop of Hunter Biden?” Mr. Ramaswamy asked reporters.

In the video of the event, most of the members of the press appeared unamused and unwilling to participate in Mr. Ramaswamy’s shenanigans, with one reporter saying it would not be appropriate for them to comment. 

The lack of participation from the press was played up by online conservatives as an example of Mr. Ramaswamy catching the national press off guard.

Mr. Ramaswamy also has played up his connections to two prominent personalities in the online conservative press-sphere, a Daily Wire host, Candace Owens, and a podcaster, Tim Pool, touting Ms. Owens’s endorsement in a video released by his campaign.

While it’s not clear how Mr. Ramaswamy’s attention from the conservative commentators will affect the small number of Iowans who attend the caucuses, one video of Mr. Ramswamy’s press conference received upward of 400,000 views on X.

One conservative commentator, Ian Miles Cheong, praised Mr. Ramswamy’s performance, saying he “casually sips water as he totally dismantles lie after lie that’s been told by the mainstream media.” 

In the polls in Iowa, Mr. Ramaswamy is carrying about 6 percent support, according to the FiveThirtyEight average of primary polls. Over the past month, his support has risen about one point in the average. Yet the Iowa caucus system is often unpredictable, and candidates in the past have delivered surprise performances in the state.

An unexpectedly strong performance from Mr. Ramaswamy, combined with his loyalty to Mr. Trump, may be able to curry enough favor with the former president should he succeed in winning the election in November.