COLUMBUS, Ohio—Just as President Donald Trump has unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Friday floated the idea of renaming another major body of water.
“Anybody think if there’s a Lake Michigan, maybe there should be a Lake Ohio around here?” Ramaswamy, a Columbus-area Republican, said Friday during a local GOP fundraiser in suburban Toledo, about 13 miles away from the shores of Lake Erie. “I’m feeling that. We’ll talk about that a little bit more as this campaign progresses.”
A campaign spokesperson said Ramaswamy was making a joke. Ramaswamy smiled broadly after making the comments, which attracted applause and scattered shouts of approval from the crowd.
It wasn’t immediately clear from the video whether Ramaswamy was talking about renaming Lake Erie, which is named for the Native American tribe that lived along its shores when Europeans first arrived in the 1600s.
Stories by Jeremy Pelzer
Erie is the only one of the five Great Lakes that touches Ohio.
Ohio’s got plenty of other lesser lakes – such as Grand Lake Saint Mary and Mosquito Lake (the latter of which a state lawmaker proposed renaming in Trump’s honor a few years ago) -- but none of them really rise to the grandeur of being the namesake of the nation’s 17th state.
Changing Lake Erie’s name to Lake Ohio would be a head-scratcher, at least from an etymological and geographical perspective.
The state of Ohio is named after the Ohio River, which doesn’t flow anywhere near Lake Erie. The two bodies of water empty on near-opposite sides of North America: the Ohio River (via the Mississippi River) into the Gulf of Mexico, and Lake Erie (via the Niagara River, Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River) into the Atlantic Ocean.
Ramaswamy’s comment, even if made in jest, fits in -- at least in tone -- with what’s become a central theme of his still-young campaign: how he will, as governor, take action to return Ohio to a level of prosperity and population growth not seen since the Industrial Revolution in the 20th Century.
Attorney General Dave Yost of Columbus, Ramaswamy’s only major primary challenger so far, responded on X to Ramaswamy’s comments by noting that Lake Erie is mentioned in the Ohio Constitution “and at least 94 statutes.” The state’s governor, he pointed out, has no unilateral authority to change either.
Yost also noted that the word “Ohio” itself means “beautiful river” in the Seneca language.
Changing the name of Lake Erie -- at least, on U.S. maps -- would require the approval of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. For the board to take such action, there “must be a compelling reason” given to change the name, and generally the most important factor is whether there is “local use and acceptance” of the name, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s website.
The board only decides on name changes after getting input from relevant state, local and tribal governments, as well as land-management agencies, among others, according to the Geological Survey’s website.
However, such hurdles didn’t stop the board from changing the Gulf of Mexico’s name on U.S. maps, as Trump ordered shortly after starting his second term in January.
Trump, of course, could likely issue a similar order for a Lake Ohio. But such an action likely would not be very well-received in nearby swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.
In general, in order to win worldwide recognition of a new name for a natural feature that is in multiple countries (like Lake Erie), the proposal would have to be well-received at organizations like the International Hydrographic Organization and the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, according to Hansong Li, a professor at American University’s School of International Service.
Since about half the lake is in Canada, Ohio’s neighbor to the north would also have to sign off on the change – which would likely be difficult to get even before Trump recently imposed tariffs that kicked off a U.S.-Canada trade war.
Ramaswamy isn’t the first to bring up the idea of changing Lake Erie’s name to Lake Ohio – there have been several scattered online calls for such a move in recent weeks, including in a week-old online petition that, as of Monday, had been signed by a grand total of 14 people.
In addition, last month Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker jokingly responded to Trump’s “Gulf of America” order by declaring that he was changing Lake Michigan’s name to “Lake Illinois.”
Jeremy Pelzer covers state politics and policy for Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.