A few months ago, few Virginian voters would have recognised Glenn Youngkin, even though at 6ft 6in tall he would be hard to miss.
If the polls are correct, the 54-year-old former college basketball player is on the cusp of dealing a body blow to Joe Biden’s presidency.
Should he win Virginia’s gubernatorial election, Mr Youngkin will set alarm bells ringing in the Democratic hierarchy.
A Republican victory in what has become a bellwether state would suggest the party is in for a mauling in next year’s mid-term elections.
Losing control of the Senate and the House would leave Mr Biden as a lame-duck president for the second half of his term.
So much hinges on this father of four who made his fortune as the chief executive of the Carlyle Group, the world’s largest private equity group, but had largely stayed below the political radar.
He climbed the corporate ladder after an academic career which started with a basketball scholarship to study mechanical engineering at Rice University in Texas before completing an MBA at Harvard Business School.
In his campaign adverts, however, Mr Youngkin prefers to emphasise how he got a job flipping eggs to help pay the family bills when his father lost his job.
It has been all part of an attempt to portray himself as a “regular guy”, explained John McGlennon, professor of public policy at the College of William and Mary.
“People know more about his ability to shoot a basketball than his politics.”
Arguably this has been Mr Youngkin’s selling point, Prof. McGlennon added.
“He was a fresh face without a record to defend. He had a style which would appeal to independent and suburban voters.”
Although he is an electoral novice, Mr Youngkin has been a generous donor to Republican candidates over the last 20 years.
Politically he is something of a chameleon, subtly adjusting his position to suit the audience.
“He is a very culturally conservative candidate. He has been the member of a breakaway Anglican church in Northern Virginia,” Prof McGlennon continued.
“He has taken a pretty strong position on gay marriage and abortion, but he didn’t highlight these things to make sure he didn’t turn off independent voters.”
That has been the nub of the campaign. In the suburbs he has pushed his moderate credentials, appealing to voters across the political spectrum by attacking the Democrats as extremists on emotive issues like the teaching of critical race theory in schools.
“What he is trying to do is walk a narrow line between the Republican base which he needs to win the election, and the affluent suburban voters who have turned away from the party because of Trump.”
Politically it is akin to threading the eye of a needle and it is a matter of debate whether he has been wholly successful.
Sebastian Gorka, a former aide to Donald Trump, is among those who have been frustrated by how Mr Youngkin’s campaign handlers have tried to massage his approach.
“He strikes me as a solid patriot who loves America,” Mr Gorka told the Telegraph.
“However, the rigmarole I went through with his gatekeepers to get him on my avowedly pro-MAGA national radio show, and the cautious language he eventually used on the program, makes it clear that he is surrounded and advised by people who are not pro-Trump and who still have no idea what really happened in America in 2016.”
( Information from telegraph.co.uk was used in this report. To Read More, click here )
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