Do we like them?

Do we like Glenn Youngkin?

Our score: 3 out of 10. Real charity gifts, but a record of pushing trans-student restrictions and campaigning for election-denying candidates keeps him low.

Youngkin is a Virginian who grew up in Richmond and Virginia Beach, studied engineering at Rice, got an MBA at Harvard, and then went to McKinsey. He joined private equity giant Carlyle in 1995, became co-CEO in 2018 and retired in 2020 to go into politics. That is the classic route from boardroom to statehouse.

He won the Virginia governorship in 2021 as a 'regular dad in a fleece vest' type, then served a single term to January 2026. His final address urged lawmakers to work with the Trump administration and not to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the state's carbon-market scheme he'd pulled Virginia out of.

On the harm test, the big one is trans kids. His administration's 2022 model policies for schools pushed restrictions on bathrooms and pronouns and put parental notification front and centre. They set off student walkouts and drew condemnation from LGBTQ+ advocates, while Youngkin framed it as parents' rights. Where you land depends on whether you read that as parental involvement or as targeting trans students, but the house rule on campaigning against trans rights is clear.

He also said he'd seek a ban on most abortions after 15 weeks once Roe fell, and put it in his budget proposal. The Senate blocked it, so it never became law. Separately, he campaigned in Arizona for Kari Lake, who has called the 2020 election stolen. Asked about it by CNN, he said Republicans needed to “look forward, not backwards”, and critics like Liz Cheney called it indefensible.

The good-person side is better. He and his wife donated his gubernatorial salary quarterly to Virginia charities, including a prison ministry, a Norfolk school and the youth group Young Life. His final budget also leaned on teacher and state worker pay rises and a drop in teacher vacancies, which his office credited to pay.

Lately he's eyeing a bigger stage. He said “I think JD Vance would make a great, great presidential nominee”, and in August launched a policy group, which keeps him in the 2028 conversation. I couldn't open the full articles this time, so the detail on his votes is thin, but the harm record above is well documented. Nice with the cheque book, hard on trans kids' rules, and not one we'd back.