RICHMOND — Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has kept everyone guessing about his White House ambitions for nearly two buzz-filled years, so long that the 2024 speculation has shifted from will he or won’t he to can he — is it even possible, this late in the game, to mount a credible campaign?
Having missed candidate-filing deadlines in key early states, Youngkin (R) could try to make a big splash in the March 5 Super Tuesday primaries. But that would require a mad dash to get on the ballot — an exercise that in some states requires gathering tens of thousands of petition signatures and filing paperwork with the strict “i”-dotting and “t”-crossing that’s tripped up even the most experienced and unhurried campaigns.
“A lot of people think you can just wake up one morning and say you’re running for president and magically your name appears on the ballot,” said Dennis Lennox, a Republican strategist who was part of a last-minute scramble around Christmas 2011 to get Mitt Romney the signatures he needed from blue congressional districts in Illinois.
Some conservatives, including media mogul Rupert Murdoch and megadonor Thomas Peterffy, have encouraged Youngkin to jump in as an alternative to Donald Trump and the host of declared Republican rivals who’ve failed to gain traction against the former president. Youngkin has conspicuously not ruled out a run, but says he will focus exclusively on state legislative races until Election Day on Tuesday, when all 140 seats in Virginia’s House and Senate will be on the ballot.
Just a handful of races in each narrowly divided chamber will determine the fate of Youngkin’s conservative legislative agenda, including banning most abortions after 15 weeks, and the viability of his national aspirations.
But even if the GOP wins Virginia in a landslide, Youngkin’s path to the GOP primary ballot would be an uphill climb.
The filing deadline in Alabama hits three days after Virginia votes next week. The cutoff in Arkansas comes Nov. 14. In Maine, Nov. 20. The window shuts Nov. 28 for the easier of two routes to the California ballot, which involves filing an application with the secretary of state. The other option gives the candidate until Dec. 15 but requires gathering signatures from a whopping 52,000 registered Republicans.
Before December is up, deadlines will come and go in 17 other states stretching from Vermont to Hawaii. Given that tight time frame, some of the GOP’s leading experts on ballot access and convention-delegate math give slim odds to a late Youngkin gambit.
“Theoretically possible” but “very, very small” is how veteran Republican elections lawyer Benjamin L. Ginsberg described Youngkin’s chances of winning the nomination. He noted daunting hurdles beyond getting on the ballot, such as finding experienced staff not already committed to other campaigns and meeting donor thresholds for remaining debates.
“A presidential campaign is like the ultimate start-up: You go from zero in the bank to needing several hundred million dollars really quickly,” Ginsberg said. “And so, if you don’t have a long runway to plan that out, which Youngkin doesn’t, campaigns tend to do an inconsistent and slapdash job when what you need is real attention to detail.”
Even more skeptical is Joshua T. Putnam, founder of Frontloading HQ, a site that tracks the presidential primary calendar.
“It’s too late,” he said. “A presidential campaign is just one thing that you’ve got to get in and get your bearings, essentially. You need time to do that. You need time to give yourself the space to make the inevitable mistakes you’re going to make and learn to recover from them. And a month or two before the Iowa caucuses is not the time to do that.”
Youngkin supporters and even some independent analysts still see a path based on qualities specific to the governor (wealthy enough to self-fund, with blue-state cred and megadonors in his corner) and the oddities of the 2024 cycle (chiefly, a front-runner facing scores of felony indictments).
“It would be a herculean task — for anyone else, yeah, probably not doable. But this is Glenn Youngkin,” said Brad Hobbs, who has been nudging his junior high school pal to seek the presidency since before he won the governorship. “There’s just nothing he can’t climb over. … He’s Superman — I mean, he is.”
Lennox, who is executive director of the Republican Party in the Virgin Islands and unaligned with any candidate, says big Republican wins in the Nov. 7 General Assembly races — though by no means assured — could power Youngkin past the forbidding logistics.
“Youngkin’s appeal — as arguably the only Republican who can expand the 2024 map and put a ‘blue’ state into play, and his ability to self-fund a credible organization overnight — would allow him to make a super-late entry into the race,” he said.
Even Lennox doubts Youngkin could pull off an outright win ahead of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July. But he says the governor might be able to garner enough delegates to deny a majority to Trump or other declared candidates, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, forcing a brokered convention.
“If Trump or DeSantis or Haley do not get a majority of the delegates and it goes to Milwaukee, then somebody like Youngkin is incredibly well-suited to play the sausage-making game that will unfold,” he said. Citing the RNC’s obscure rule 40(b), Lennox noted that a candidate only needs a plurality — not a majority — of delegates from five or more states to be eligible for nomination at the convention.
Officials with Youngkin’s Spirit of Virginia political action committee did not respond directly to questions about the logistical hurdles Youngkin would face. They also declined to discuss any plans he might have in place to overcome them; that sort of preparation would undermine Youngkin’s oft-repeated claim that he will not give a thought to the presidency before the General Assembly elections.
“Governor Youngkin is spending every waking moment making the case for our Virginia candidates — telling voters why they should send him a team in Richmond to keep moving Virginia forward,” Dave Rexrode, chairman of the PAC, said in an email to The Washington Post.
Youngkin has been the focus of presidential chatter since the political newcomer flipped blue-leaning Virginia red in November 2021. He and his team have fanned speculation that he will get into the race with hectic cross-country political travel, forays into international politics and a flurry of self-promoting videos, including one casting him as the successor to President Ronald Reagan.
Even in the homestretch of the General Assembly races, Youngkin hosted a two-day retreat for national GOP megadonors at a luxury Virginia Beach resort on Oct. 16 and 17.
Days later, he flew across the country to California for an undisclosed political trip. (The Virginia State Police, which provides a security detail to the governor, confirmed the political travel on Oct. 19 in response to a Freedom of Information request from The Post. Youngkin’s PAC did not respond to questions about the trip.)
Hobbs, the childhood friend who mixed with fellow donors at the retreat, said he does not know whether Youngkin plans to get into the race.
“I think his primary focus is his family and the commonwealth of Virginia, and that’s what’s made this an extremely difficult decision,” he said.
Whatever the governor decides, Youngkin has already set a new standard for 11th-hour presidential flirtation, making the plane that New York Gov. Mario Cuomo (D) kept idling on the tarmac in Albany a generation ago look like an early bird.
While Cuomo weighed winging to New Hampshire in December 1991 just hours ahead of the filing deadline for the first-in-the-nation primary, the Democrat ended his two-month presidential tease when he kept the jet grounded that day. Up against a more front-loaded primary calendar, Youngkin has fed the buzz even after missing deadlines in Nevada (Oct. 16), New Hampshire (Oct. 27) and South Carolina (Oct. 31).
Money would not be a problem for Youngkin, who has support from some megadonors who have soured on Trump and DeSantis. The former Carlyle Group executive — worth $470 million, Forbes estimated when he won the Executive Mansion — is capable of self-funding the ballot-access enterprise that typically costs millions of dollars even for campaigns that don’t have to rely on professional signature-gathering firms, as Youngkin’s probably would.
Team Youngkin is unlikely to blink at candidate-filing fees that some cash-strapped campaigns can’t easily afford, such as the $50,000 required at this point to run in the Virgin Islands. (The cost was $20,000 for those who filed there by Sept. 30.)
But getting on the ballot would still be a slog of grass-roots grunt work and legal nitty-gritty that varies from state to state.
In some states, only registered Republicans may sign petitions for the party’s primaries, with a certain portion required to hail from each congressional district.
In others, any voter from anywhere in the state is good enough. Some states allow voters to sign petitions for multiple candidates, while others restrict them to just one.
Virginia is one of the more challenging states, though the home-state governor would certainly have an advantage. He would need 5,000 signatures, including 200 from each of the state’s 11 congressional districts, by Dec. 14.
Four Republican candidates failed to qualify in Virginia in 2012 — then-Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.), former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr. — because they were unaware that the state then banned out-of-state residents from collecting signatures. (Non-Virginians may do so now if they file a notarized affidavit.)
Only Romney and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) qualified for the ballot in the Old Dominion that year, when the signature requirement was 10,000.
Some states make it fairly simple, including Alabama. All that’s needed there is a $20,000 filing fee and a few hundred signatures (500 from any qualified voters, or just 350 if at least 50 signatures come from each of the state’s seven congressional districts).
The Alabama Republican Party says on its website that presidential candidates “should contact the office to arrange for payment prior to the close of qualifying.” But party spokeswoman Jeannie Negrón Burniston said that warning is really just to make sure campaigns have the information needed for a wire transfer, if they want to pay that way.
“If he shows up at 4:59 Central standard time with a check in hand, and fills out the form and has the [signatures], he will [get on the ballot],” she said, referring to Youngkin. She clarified that he could send a representative.
Tennessee makes it especially easy, waiving its 2,500-signature petition requirement for anyone who forks over $10,000 to the state GOP by Dec. 5.
“Pretty much just, ‘Here’s my money,’ and you’re good to go,” said Tyler Burns, political director of the Tennessee Republican Party.
Maine is on the trickier side. By Nov. 20, a campaign must submit petition signatures from at least 2,000 — but no more than 2,500 — registered Republican voters to the various municipalities where each voter is registered. Once the registrations are certified, the campaign needs to deliver the petitions to the state by Dec. 1.
Getting on the ballot in some states grows harder as time goes on. It’s a low bar at first in Michigan, where the secretary of state will put anyone “generally advocated by the news media to be a potential candidate” on the ballot on Nov. 10.
The state GOP chairman can add a name through Nov. 14. But after that, candidates have until Dec. 8 to collect 13,249 signatures. (Those dates could shift slightly because the state’s primary, tentatively scheduled for Feb. 27, could change.)
“From a purely mathematical perspective, if Youngkin was able to gain ballot access to the Super Tuesday states and beyond, it could be done,” said Allan Keiter, founder of the nonpartisan elections website 270toWin. “More than 90 percent of the estimated delegates don’t get allocated until Super Tuesday or later.”
Keiter also notes that states holding contests before March 15 “are not allowed to have pure winner-take-all allocations,” making it easier for a latecomer to amass some delegates.
“However, this is not a purely mathematical exercise,” added Keiter, who says Trump’s dominance over a large and diverse field of GOP challengers is probably a more serious obstacle than any nuts-and-bolts logistics.
“I see this as a non-starter … to the point that it borders on farcical,” said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst for the Cook Political Report, who also thinks the taller order is overcoming Trump’s seemingly unshakable grip on the GOP base. That’s true even in Virginia, where the governor is fairly popular.
Among Republican and Republican-leaning Virginia voters, 54 percent said they would prefer Trump to be the party’s nominee, while 39 percent would rather it be Youngkin, a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll found.
“It’s very tempting to get in the race when you’ve got people willing to cut you seven-figure checks,” Wasserman said, but that doesn’t translate into support from Republican voters, who “are not in the market for a Trump alternative overall.”
Even if Trump falters, some political analysts question why voters would suddenly gravitate toward Youngkin, who has failed to register in national polls despite frequent appearances on Fox News programs.
“He has zero percent name ID. Literally people have no idea who he is,” said Amy Walter, publisher and editor in chief at Cook. “Why would a person coming out of nowhere, who nobody knows, be viable all of a sudden?”
Geoffrey Skelley, senior elections analyst at the nonpartisan elections website FiveThirtyEight, sees “a little bit of Michael Bloomberg” in Youngkin, referring to the former New York mayor and Democrat who lavished a chunk of his personal fortune on a belated and ultimately humiliating Super Tuesday strategy.
“Cost him about $1 billion,” Skelley said. “All for American Samoa.”
correction
A previous version of this article incorrectly reported that there was a last-minute scramble around Christmas 2012 to get Mitt Romney the signatures he needed from blue congressional districts in Illinois. It occurred in 2011. The article has been updated.
