The GOP’s backup quarterback should stay on the bench
Varad Mehta
Glenn Youngkin played basketball, but Republican donors and other influential figures on the Right want him to try out for another sport. That sport is football, and in football, there’s no member of the team more popular than the backup quarterback. Standing on the sideline game after game, he carries all of the fans’ hopes but none of the team’s failures. The pressure’s all on the starter, the one actually on the field, yet it’s often the backup they’re rooting for: All the team has to do is put him in and voila, instant change of fortune. Which is just what the GOP’s moneyed classes, dismayed by the other candidates’ inability to overcome former President Donald Trump’s massive lead, are dreaming will happen if they can convince Virginia’s governor to suit up and take the field. There’s just one problem: The moment Youngkin entered the race, he’d be doing it, to borrow an analogy from a third sport, when the other runners are already 10 laps ahead.
Not that this is dissuading his many admirers, who, to hear the media tell it, are this close in their courtship of the former Carlyle Group executive to standing outside his house with boombox in hand to blast Peter Gabriel at him. According to a recent Axios report, “panicked” donors are withholding money from the current crop of contenders because they haven’t given up hope “of luring an alternative to former President Trump into the presidential race at the last minute.” Among the party’s billionaire benefactors ready to shower Youngkin with cash if he throws his hat into the ring are Ronald Lauder and Thomas Peterffy. The latter has donated significant sums to Youngkin’s super PAC. The prospect of further such largesse should he accept their entreaties will, they and their cohorts no doubt hope, be a potent inducement for him to do so.
YOUNGKIN LAUNCHES EARLY VOTING BUS TOUR AHEAD OF PIVOTAL VIRGINIA ELECTIONS
Even more potent would be the backing of a media empire, which is the prospect on offer from Youngkin’s most ardent suitor, Rupert Murdoch. One of the most powerful people in the conservative firmament, the News Corp and Fox News impresario “has repeatedly encouraged” Youngkin to enter the 2024 contest, the Washington Post revealed last month.
The leak of Murdoch’s appeals to Youngkin coincided with a burst of favorable coverage in his media properties. On Aug. 11, for example, the Wall Street Journal published an encomium by editorial board member Kate Bachelder Odell. Should Youngkin prevail in November’s state legislative elections, wrote Odell, “it will be a major political story with national implications,” one that “might bust open the race for the White House.” Two days later, the New York Post issued its own panegyric. In columnist Miranda Devine’s telling, the “6-foot-7 gentle giant with a perpetual smile” is an almost heroic figure, a “genial former private equity chief executive” who in less than two years in office has “started to turn his state around” with his economic and educational policies.
Chatter about Youngkin’s future in politics, which is to say his prospects as an eventual candidate for president, began practically as soon as he pulled off his comeback victory in Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial election, when he became the first Republican in 12 years to win the top office in that increasingly blue commonwealth. But it really picked up as the 2024 campaign cycle kicked into gear. Indeed, “Will he or won’t he?” has been a recurring subplot all year.
In April, the answer appeared to be a definite “no,” as he told “advisers and donors that his sole focus is on Virginia’s legislative elections in the fall,” in the words of the New York Times’s Trip Gabriel. Yet a few weeks later, he answered a question at an event by stating he didn’t plan to run for president “this year,” leaving the door open to a 2024 entry. By the end of May, multiple reports indicated that Youngkin was considering entering the lists after all, albeit not until after November’s elections. The on-again, off-again romance has continued ever since, and despite Youngkin’s reticence and the “mixed signals” he has sent, his putative beaus’ ardor has never cooled.
Furiously as they’ve been swiping right on Youngkin, donors have supposedly been swiping left with equal vigor on the man once seen as Trump’s most formidable rival. A common theme of articles about efforts to enlist Youngkin, therefore, is party bigwigs’ disenchantment with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). This includes, the New York Times observed in July, Murdoch. Each recrudescence of “DeSantis struggles” stories seems to bring a fresh deluge of ink about the Youngkin recruiting push. They are arguably sides of the same coin, the two narratives accelerating in tandem.
Whether as a replacement for DeSantis or as a candidate in his own right, Youngkin makes a lot of sense. For one thing, he fits the profile the party’s wealthiest backers love, i.e., their own: Like them, he’s a plutocrat who made his fortune in finance and private equity. He also has an attractive persona that can bridge the factions of the party. The Washington Post’s description makes him almost a unicorn, a candidate who doesn’t alienate its moneymen yet can win over “evangelicals as someone who started a church in his basement” and has the “ability to wage MAGA culture wars in the style of the friendly dad next door.” Virginians seem to like what they’ve seen of him so far. An August poll showed Youngkin leading President Joe Biden in a hypothetical 2024 matchup in the Old Dominion by 7 points.
No wonder the GOP’s fat cats are falling over each other to coax Youngkin into running and believe the door remains open, even at this late date. They are wrong. And so is he if he believes he can get in after November’s elections. The idea Youngkin can still jump into the presidential race is a fantasy. It’s already too late — and has been for months.
The logistics alone make it nearly impossible. The filing deadline for Nevada is Oct. 16. South Carolina’s is Halloween. Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s are later, but two months is a narrow window to fundraise, establish state and national campaign infrastructures, and set up ground games in the early states. Perhaps Youngkin could tap his bank account. He spent $20 million of his own money on his gubernatorial endeavor. But no amount can turn a sapling planted on Monday into a tree by Sunday.
Come November, Youngkin would have missed the first three debates. In addition, even if he did make the initial two states, he wouldn’t make the next two. He’d go over four weeks without appearing on a ballot. Any momentum he might gain would dissipate, and momentum once squandered is difficult to recapture. Youngkin would be trapped on the sidelines, a candidate in limbo. An eleventh-hour entrance would thus be tantamount to writing off Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. Sure, he could still win after that. But it’s much easier when you haven’t forfeited the first set.
Youngkin’s image is deceptive. Donors may think he’s a Romney-esque throwback, but underneath, he’s nothing of the sort. Several of DeSantis’s contributors announced they were reconsidering their support for the Florida governor due to their displeasure with his social agenda, such as the six-week abortion ban he signed earlier this year. Youngkin, though, supports similar policies. He wants to implement a 15-week ban in Virginia. For those donors who’d prefer the GOP avoid abortion altogether, that may prove equally unpalatable.
Despite his centrist facade, Youngkin won by pressing the exact kind of hot-button cultural issues that are anathema to the donor class: parental rights, restricting gender ideology in schools, and so forth. In July, his administration released new regulations requiring Virginia schools to refer to students by the name and gender on their record unless their parents approve otherwise. The regulations also stipulate that students must in most instances use bathrooms matching their sex. How society deals with transgender minors is one of the most salient social issues in the country today. Youngkin has shown as little inclination to shy away from it as DeSantis. Far from it, in fact, as he has made parental rights a central part of his pitch to Virginia voters for November’s elections.
So although Youngkin may not be “running kamikaze missions that alienate suburban Republicans,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Odell phrased it, that didn’t stop him from signing a law requiring pornography websites to implement more stringent age-verification requirements if they wish to continue operating in Virginia. And while he may be a “happy culture warrior,” in the estimation of the New York Post’s Devine, the emphasis is as much on the culture warrior as it is on the happy. How donors react when they realize this remains to be seen.
If Youngkin’s culture warrior credentials aren’t as burnished as DeSantis’s, he can blame, or thank, his legislature. Unlike his Florida counterpart, who enjoys supermajorities in both chambers, Youngkin has been restrained by a divided legislature in which the Democratic-controlled state Senate can block him from enacting the kind of social policies that red-state governors have been over the last few years that are anathema to the donor class.
That could change if Republicans retain the House of Delegates and flip the Senate this November. A man who can achieve a GOP trifecta in Virginia in 2023 is by definition someone to reckon with. It is the promise that Youngkin can pull off this feat that makes him most alluring to donors. Yet it is also the thing most preventing him from getting in. Youngkin can run for president or he can win Virginia’s legislative elections. But he can’t do both. Should he declare before November, the election would become nationalized, and Democrats would use his candidacy against Virginia Republicans. And if he waits, it will be too late to enter the race. Either way, Youngkin must sacrifice something dear: his presidential ambitions or the electoral triumph that would make those ambitions possible.
If Youngkin faces a dilemma, so do the donors who want him to go for it. And unlike his, theirs is of their own making. They had an ideal alternative in DeSantis, who coming off his massive triumph last November was polling competitively with Trump through the winter and spring. But instead of lining up forcefully behind him, they decided to wait. Their dithering and delaying encouraged other candidates to jump in, leading to the fractured, confused mess from which they now pine for a deus ex Virginia to save them.
Donors pining for Youngkin are guilty of the oh-so-human tendency to imagine that whatever you don’t have is better than what you do simply because you don’t have it. He is the candidate of the other side of the fence, where the grass is greener and life is free of flaws, shortcomings, and imperfections. Unlike DeSantis and his peers, whose campaigns, so far as they’re concerned, have been nothing but. Youngkin, they pray, stands at the gates to the promised land. Perhaps he does. Sometimes the grass really is greener. But most of the time, it’s just weeds.
The harsh reality those who want him have so far refused to acknowledge is that if Republicans need Youngkin to rescue them, they’re already screwed. First of all, there’s no reason to think Youngkin would fare any better than DeSantis. He barely registered in the same polls that showed DeSantis on Trump’s heels. At this point, moreover, a Youngkin entry would be counterproductive. By November, the field will be consolidating as candidates begin dropping out. Getting in then would simply divide it again, like breaking up ice that’s starting to solidify. All that would freeze then is the GOP’s hopes. Youngkin may already have felt a chill. If he thought he had a shot, he’d have declared by now. That he hasn’t speaks volumes, even if the donors can’t hear it.
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They may still be deaf. Despite polls indicating Republican viewers rated DeSantis’s performance during the first primary debate among the best, and his campaign raising $1 million the day after it, numerous party higher-ups in attendance, the Dispatch’s David Drucker reported, were still casting longing looks Youngkin’s way afterward. The longer this infatuation persists, the longer it will take donors who had soured on DeSantis to start remembering what drew them to him as the best option to challenge Trump. And remember they must. They don’t really have a choice. DeSantis is in the game. Youngkin is not. If they want to win, they’ll have to do it with a player already on the field, not one who’s unlikely ever to set foot on it.
Beyond why the logistics are bad, can you explain why the logic behind this mentality is bad/counterproductive? Maybe because they just want someone like them rather than who is on offer or there’s always greener grass or some combination of both.
Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on Twitter @varadmehta.