Richmond, Va. — Interested in hearing about Glenn Youngkin’s political ambitions beyond Virginia? Good luck getting him to talk. “My future is going to be defined,” he told me here recently, “by continuing to stay focused on being the best governor I could possibly be.”

After last fall’s state legislative elections ended in a whimper for Virginia Republicans, Youngkin has faded somewhat from a national media conversation that now revolves almost exclusively around the presidential race. Virginia bars governors from serving consecutive terms. Youngkin’s ends in January 2026, and he hears the clock ticking. “We just have a tremendous sense of urgency on everything that we’re working on,” Youngkin says a few days after both signing a bipartisan budget and breaking the record for the most vetoes, 201, issued by a Virginia governor during a General Assembly session.

For now, Youngkin says, he’s keeping the focus on his day job, helping Donald Trump and other Republicans win in 2024 and continuing to sell conservatism with a smile, all while staying true to his brand.

“What I’ve found is that core, commonsense, conservative values appeal to a broad section of Virginians that I think are a microcosm of the nation,” he says. “And I don’t think we need to water down what we say. We just need to communicate it clearly.”

In 2021, Virginia Republicans found themselves a unicorn candidate in Youngkin, a temperamentally moderate former college basketball player, Carlyle Group co-CEO, and political newcomer with a razor-sharp focus on pandemic-era mask mandates and K–12 school closures. The former private-equity executive capitalized on serious miscalculations by his well-known Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, the former governor who ran a negative campaign and underestimated the savviness of the GOP nominee’s parents’ rights pitch. Youngkin also welcomed Trump’s endorsement while being careful not to campaign alongside him in a state that Joe Biden carried by ten points in 2020.

The political calculus looks different these days after Youngkin’s post–Super Tuesday endorsement of Trump. With the presidential race now upon us, the governor regularly praises the presumptive nominee in media interviews.

Speaking with NR in late May, he brings up Trump before I do. One reason he thinks that his blue-leaning state is “in play” in 2024 is that Virginians will “continue to compare a strong leader in Donald Trump against a weak leader in Joe Biden” on foreign policy, securing the southern border, and the “rip-roaring economy that Trump built versus an economy that’s been completely infused with inflation” under the current president.

About a week and a half after our interview, twelve Manhattan jurors convicted Trump on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in connection with a hush-money payment to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election — a verdict Youngkin characterized later that day as a “a politically motivated prosecution orchestrated by those who want to ‘get’ President Trump.” Two days later at their convention, he urged Virginia Republicans to embrace their presumptive presidential nominee.

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A few moments after we settle into a massive black SUV on a late-May afternoon, an upbeat Youngkin can barely contain his excitement about an economic-development project he’s about to announce to a crowd of entrepreneurs gathered in a nearby Carmax. “So many people think that government is a bill, and it’s not,” Youngkin tells me after launching the new partnership, between seven venture-capital funds and the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corp., to invest tens of millions of dollars in previously awarded U.S. Treasury funds to 100 high-growth Virginia-based start-ups. “What effective long-term results are generated by is getting foundational elements in place,” he says. “And in the world of creating a job machine that provides opportunity to people that is unrivaled around the nation, we have to have an entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

Youngkin’s fluency in finance has led many of his allies to boost him as a possible secretary of the Treasury or the Commerce Department. But his acumen ranges wider. For example, as the governor of a shipbuilding state with one of the largest veteran populations in the country, he’s comfortable answering questions about foreign policy.

“Vladimir Putin can’t be allowed to win,” he says. “Iran can’t be allowed to win. Israel cannot be left alone, and China has to be stood up against.” He firmly believes in the “Ronald Reagan parlance that we achieve peace through strength,” and adds a fiscal-conservative flair: “That doesn’t mean we’re irresponsible and we throw money places without any accountability for it.”

Education policy remains at the forefront. The “crystallizing moment” for the parents’-rights movement was the pandemic, Youngkin said at this year’s Reagan Institute Summit on Education in Washington, D.C. “All of a sudden, school came home and parents were told that a twelve-inch screen was a quality education.”

Now that Covid has come and gone, Youngkin counts among his achievements the $5 billion in tax relief passed by the legislature, the unmasking of kids in K–12 schools, record education budgets, the rewriting of K–12 curricula, and drawing a Lego manufacturing facility and the headquarters of Boeing and Raytheon Technologies to Virginia. “He’ll be leaving in several years as a very successful governor of Virginia, and that is platform enough for him to pursue whatever he would choose to, following his time in public office,” says former Arizona governor Doug Ducey, who chaired the Republican Governors Association in 2021.

Youngkin has also faced setbacks. He was caught flat-footed when Democrats in the legislature didn’t support a tentative deal he’d struck with Monumental Sports and Entertainment to move the Wizards and Capitals from D.C. to Alexandria. And he didn’t ace his midterm test in fall 2023. Republican state-legislative candidates leaned into his proposal on a 15-week limit (with exceptions) on abortion but were vastly outspent on the issue. Even though Republicans gained a state-senate seat and carried many legislative districts Trump had lost in 2020, they lost the House of Delegates by a whisker — dashing Youngkin’s hopes for a Republican trifecta and leaving him beholden to a Democratic-controlled legislature for the rest of his term.

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Ask friends, allies, and former staffers to describe Youngkin in a few words and you’ll get some variation of the following: an “incredibly competitive” “happy warrior” and “sports fanatic” who is “good with people,” “driven by his faith and his family,” and genuinely loves being governor. As the woman at the front desk put it while I was awaiting my interview, “what you see is what you get.”

Throughout our conversation, Youngkin is chipper and relaxed — until I ask about a frenetic eleventh-hour effort by some Trump-skeptical donors to nudge him into the GOP presidential primaries. I recite to Youngkin comments about him that Thomas Peterffy, a Hungarian-born billionaire who donated millions to Youngkin’s super PAC last fall, made to reporter Robert Costa in September 2023. “He appears to be leaving the door open,” Peterffy said. “And if Republicans win in Virginia, maybe we can talk him into it. He obviously wants to see what emerges, what the state of play is.”

Youngkin scoots forward in his chair.

“I was incredibly clear to everybody that I was focused on Virginia,” he says, reminding me that he didn’t travel to Iowa, New Hampshire, or other early-primary states last fall. “I have a big job. I love this job. I don’t think anybody was surprised when in fact the whole primary process came and went and I was still focused on Virginia, because that’s what I told everybody I was going to be doing.” Looking well beyond this cycle, Trump-skeptical donors aren’t subtle about their hopes for a Youngkin presidential run someday. “Of all the politicians I’ve ever met, he strikes me as the one who I’d most like to see as the leader of this country,” Peterffy tells National Review.

Even now it’s difficult to get Youngkin to talk about what’s next, sometimes to the frustration of his staffers. He dismisses in private the idea of running for the U.S. Senate, those close to him say. And in public he bats away questions about whether he’d serve in a second Trump administration.

“Every day I bound out of bed, I’m overwhelmed by the privilege of serving Virginians,” Youngkin tells NR. “There’s lots of great people who can serve in the Trump administration, and lots of roles. I know many of them. I’m impressed wildly by them. So we’ve got lots of talent. And I do expect that my focus will continue to be here in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

As he weighs his options, the next task for the country’s most prominent parents’-rights advocate is to avoid being seen in the rearview mirror as a one-term wonder from the bygone pandemic era.

He’d be “a fantastic cabinet member” for Trump, says Dallas-based businessman Roy Bailey, who served as national finance co-chairman for Trump’s 2020 campaign and as a national finance chairman for Ron DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign. What of Youngkin’s viability in 2028? “I think he would appeal to both conservatives and moderates, if there is such a thing,” says Bailey, who is now helping DeSantis raise funds for Trump in 2024. “It’s hard to tell where the party is right now.”

One former presidential-campaign strategist compared Youngkin’s current predicament to that of two-term governor Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.), a foil of sorts who is channeling his waning political capital into left-leaning gun-control advocacy. Youngkin “needs to find a platform of some kind,” the strategist said, because “a former one-term governor of Virginia” will “find it hard” “to sustain himself for three years on that.”

As he nears the end of his term, Youngkin appears comfortable taking the next couple of years for what they are. “The governor and first lady are people of faith,” says a person familiar with Youngkin’s thinking. “If they feel called to do something, they’re not looking to ride off into the sunset. . . . If there’s a group of people that think he should serve in some other way in the future, he’s going to listen. But he’s also just not the kind of guy that is willing to step out there and audition and go seek this out. He’s going to have to be talked into this.”

As many presidential hopefuls have learned the hard way, a pristine résumé, a high approval rating, and a cadre of enthusiastic donors don’t automatically translate into success in national elections — particularly when the political winds are blowing in a populist direction. For now, “I’m very focused on the job I’m doing,” Youngkin says, “and I love it.”