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.