Why do we care whether Republican candidate Tim Scott has a girlfriend?

The video in question was from a May event organized by the news website Axios, where the interviewer asked the South Carolina senator about the possibility of becoming the first bachelor president since the 19th century. “I probably have more time, more energy and more latitude to do the job,” he replies. And then the senator adds — quickly, as an aside: “My girlfriend wants to see me when I come home.”

The Republican operative who called me wasn’t sure said girlfriend existed. He suggested I look into it. He followed up on our conversation with an email that included a dossier of Scott’s known personal relationships. “No fingerprints,” he said.

Scott’s romantic endeavors aren’t a scandal so much as they are a mystery. At 57, he’s never been married and rarely talks about girlfriends past or present. Late last year, as Scott was ramping up his run for president, I asked Jennifer DeCasper, his close friend and campaign manager, about the status of his dating life. “It’s nonexistent,” she said.

Now, Scott was suggesting otherwise. And the timing of that revelation seemed a bit convenient.

“He has staked so much on his personal story, character and faith,” said the operative, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because, well, that’s how people kick dirt around in this business. “He’s running as America’s pastor, so to speak, as he courts evangelicals in Iowa, and I think a lot of folks may wonder about his lack of a family.”

It seemed like a not-terribly-original attempt to stir up gossip among conservative voters about how an unmarried Republican candidate might be weird about women, or to raise questions about his sexuality within the party’s stubbornly homophobic factions. (And let’s just get this out of the way: This is not a wink-wink story that uses “single” in place of “gay.” Despite the retrograde assumptions people still like to make about wifeless men of a certain age, there really is nothing to suggest that Scott is anything other than a confirmed bachelor in the most literal sense of the phrase.)

I wasn’t interested in laundering innuendos for this Republican operative. At the same time, the whole exchange left me intrigued about how voter interest (or lack thereof) in Scott’s love life (or lack thereof) might illuminate the politics of marriage, family and masculinity in today’s GOP. Donald Trump scrambled the values of the “family values” party to such a degree that the base kept loving him despite the “locker-room talk” about grabbing women and the allegation — which Trump denies — that he had cheated on his third wife with a porn star.

And yet, for all the conventional wisdom that went out the door when Trump walked in, a long-held belief persists: that the absence of a wife and kids would make voters uneasy, especially the kind who vote in Republican primaries. Was that still true?

There is a legitimate public interest in the partner of any would-be president. A first lady in waiting is typically a close confidante whose values reflect on, and influence, a potential leader of the free world. If Scott and his mystery woman were still in the get-to-know-you phase, voters might feel the right to get to know her, too. Plus, a new relationship can be strange to navigate under ordinary circumstances, so what’s it like when one of the people is running for president?

I decided that, yes, I would try to figure out whether Tim Scott has a girlfriend.

But I would also investigate a deeper question: Does anybody care?

On a Tuesday morning in mid-August, Scott sat on an outdoor stage at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, discussing his thoughts on policies that allow parents to direct public funds to private schools (he’s for it) and China “spying on our kids” via TikTok (he’s against). While he spoke, DeCasper, his campaign manager, stood at the back of the crowd in a campaign T-shirt.

“Do you work for Tim Scott?” asked an 88-year-old man in a short-sleeved checkered button-up and a National Rifle Association cap.

The man was Max Hagen, a self-described “Fairaholic” who claimed to have shaken every president’s hand since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“How come he doesn’t bring his wife and kids with him like all the other candidates do?” Hagen asked.

“Well,” DeCasper said, “that’s because he’s single.”

“He has a very lovely girlfriend.”

“How come he doesn’t bring her around?”

Frankly, the whole interaction was a bit on-the-nose. I had come to Iowa to try to get an idea of what people thought of his being a bachelor. DeCasper, who previously served as Scott’s chief of staff, had told me last year that, yes, there were times in his career when Scott had fretted about “the optics” of not having a spouse. More recently, however, she had told her boss not to worry about it. “Honey, it’s two-thousand-whatever, you’re fine,” she recalled saying to Scott. She had told me something similar last fall: “That’s old-school,” she’d said about needing a spouse to run for president. “We don’t operate that way anymore.”

It’s true that remaining single deep into adulthood is not as unusual as it used to be. In 1980, only 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married, according to Pew Research; in 2021, it was 25 percent. In politics, however, a family tableau remains core to “the optics.” The Republican primary field includes a conservative variety pack of Wife Guys — such as Ron DeSantis, who reportedly changed the way he pronounced his last name to the way his wife, Casey, preferred saying it, and Mike Pence, who reportedly won’t eat alone with a woman unless his wife, Karen, is also present. And although there have been unmarried candidates for president over the years — including the other Republican senator from South Carolina, Lindsey O. Graham, in 2015 — you would have to go all the way back to Grover Cleveland, in 1884, to find a bachelor who won. (Cleveland married two years later.) Before that, there was James Buchanan, who stayed single after winning in 1856. And yeah, it was a thing.

“An Old Bachelor is at most but a half man,” wrote the New York Evening Post in an editorial about Buchanan. “How can such a person make more than a half-President?”

Fast-forward to two-thousand-whatever. Despite an evolving understanding of gender — or, more likely, because of it — Republicans have made defining “masculinity” a part of their political playbook. This includes promoting some pretty old-school ideas about marriage.

“Men are meant to be husbands, to form the virtues of a husband in their souls,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote in his book “Manhood.”

Before Trump, when Tim Miller was working in opposition research on the Republican side, finding a sex scandal used to be an effective way to topple an opponent. It may say something about our current political moment that Scott’s opponents might see an opportunity to damage him with a sexless scandal.

“What might be salient with Republican voters is not that he isn’t a perfect family man,” Miller told me, “but that he might not have the macho womanizing strength of the MAGA god-king.”

Scott’s current mission is to impress a particular subset of Republicans: the ones who will be participating in the Iowa caucuses early next year. What do they think of the idea of an unmarried, childless commander in chief?

“I think 10 or 20 years ago, people had a kind of romance with the first family,” said Bob Vander Plaats, the head of the Family Leader, a social conservative organization in Iowa. “But I think our country is at the point where being married isn’t the top qualifier. It probably doesn’t make the Top 50.”

Scott’s umarriedness isn’t the only thing that distinguishes him from other Republicans who are trying to rise in the party. He is not a perpetually aggrieved, rhetorically aggressive culture-warrior type. He’s also a Black man who has spoken out against whitewashing America’s racial history and has experienced being stopped by the police frequently for offenses such as, as he put it in 2016, “driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood.”

At the same time, Scott does not believe there is systemic racism in America today, and lately he has been talking a lot about “backing the blue,” locking up violent criminals, securing the southern border and implementing a federal ban on abortions after the 15th week of a pregnancy, “at a minimum.”

When I asked Steve Deace, a conservative talk-show host from Iowa, about how Scott’s marital status plays into everything, Deace predicted that Republican voters aren’t going to evaluate the candidate on that factor alone — but that it could work against him if he doesn’t measure up in other ways.

“In the end, someone who is unmarried, hasn’t been part of a meaningful conservative fight and was on the wrong side of virtually every flash point in the last cycle just won’t pass muster,” he said. “If he were polling in double digits in November, there would be a super PAC running ads in Iowa pointing this stuff out.” (Scott is polling at 9 percent in the state, per an August poll by the respected Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer.)

For now, many of the Republicans checking out Scott at the Iowa fair didn’t really seem to specifically care that Scott was single.

“What matters to me is that he’s in favor of putting the family unit back together,” said Brian Heck, 60. “I’d be more worried about him having a bunch of illegitimate kids than having no kids.”

“I wouldn’t want someone to bring their children to the White House. That’s no place for them,” said Connie Hoksbergen, 57.

“I think it will just be less distracting,” said Greg Pollak, a pastor from Altoona, noting the drama that has lately swirled around presidential offspring. “It seems like the family have been a problem these past several years. I could even see it being an advantage.”

Scott’s parents didn’t have a marriage worth aspiring to. In his memoir, “America: A Redemption Story,” Scott writes that his father was a mercurial man who suffered mental trauma while serving in Vietnam, and whose drinking and tirades drove his mother — along with Scott and his older brother — out of the house.

As a teenager, Scott found a father figure in a man named John Moniz, the owner of a Chick-fil-A franchise, who mentored Scott and taught him about conservative values. Scott was a charmer, even back then, according to Brian Moniz, John’s son and Scott’s friend since childhood. Scott and the younger Moniz used to spend a lot of time hanging around the mall and flirting with girls.

“He’s always had a way with the ladies,” Moniz said.

I’ve seen Scott flirt. It was 2012, and we were having lunch at Clyde’s in downtown Washington. A waitress came up and put her hand on his freshly shaved (and perspiring) head.

“I think you’re hot,” she told him. “I can feel your heat from over here.”

“Most people say I’m hot,” Scott said. “I agree.”

A few days after that, I asked Scott whether he was still a virgin.

The question wasn’t quite as prurient as it might sound. I had been assigned to write an article about Scott, then a freshman member of Congress, for National Journal. In my research, I’d found a 1995 interview he’d done with the Charleston Post and Courier in which he’d discussed speaking to students about the importance of abstinence until marriage. “Talking to teens and college students about sexual purity is a hot ticket for me because I’m single,” Scott, then a 30-year-old city councilman, had told the paper. “I know what it means to struggle on the issue of sex. But it’s worth the wait.” Seventeen years later, he was still unmarried, and sex education was a political issue, so it seemed fair to ask whether the congressman — who, according to the same article, once drove a Nissan with a bumper sticker that said “True Love Waits” — practiced what he preached.

“Not as well as I did then,” he said, adding that he still believed sex before marriage was a “sin” and that he wished “we all had more patience.”

Around the time that article ran in National Journal, The Washington Post reported that Scott had taken the general manager of a Charleston lingerie store called Bits of Lace on a trip to an exclusive resort. Less than a year later, anonymous sources told a gossip blog that the two had broken up.

Since then, Scott has occasionally hinted at past and present girlfriends while never mentioning anyone by name, which only led to questions like this from CNN’s Dana Bash in 2017:

“What gives?” she asked about his unmarried status.

Scott then surprised Bash by offering an otherwise unreported tidbit: that he had once been engaged.

“I didn’t know that,” Bash said, to which Scott offered a deadpan reply: “Shhh, don’t tell anyone.”

Apparently nobody told Brian Moniz, the childhood friend.

“No, I don’t think he’s ever been engaged,” he said when I spoke to him in August.

As for any current girlfriend, Moniz said: “I am not aware of anyone at this time.”

Playing things close to the vest doesn’t necessarily play well with everyone. A few weeks ago, Axios reported that Scott’s privacy about his personal life was an issue with conservative donors who might otherwise consider backing his candidacy. “The joke has always been that he is secretly gay or something,” the unnamed operative told me. “I don’t really buy that. But he’s got an interesting history.” The dossier he’d sent included details about Scott having owned property and shared a jet ski with male friends.

Scott is not gay, DeCasper told me, and nobody who knows him suggested otherwise. But the rumor mill is lazy, and the “joke” about the senator’s sexuality still gets repeated. Early last year, for example, Matt Schlapp, the head of the Conservative Political Action Conference, asked me whom I thought Trump might choose as his 2024 running mate. When I mentioned Scott, Schlapp replied: “You think he picks a gay vice president?” (Incidentally, Schlapp, who is married with five kids, was later accused of unwanted groping by a male staffer on Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign. He has denied the allegations.)

According to Moniz, Scott’s bachelorhood is a simple case of being married to his job.

“It’s been a challenge, mainly for the females in his life over the years,” Moniz said. “They get put on the back burner. Women have hung around for a while, and they realize they’re not going to be the top priority right now.”

Bobby Harrell, who has been friends with Scott since the two served together in the South Carolina State House, told me that Scott talked often about how much he admired Harrell’s 44-year marriage and “wished for something like it someday.” In 2018, Scott told Politico that he wanted to have six(!) children once he found “Mrs. Right.”

“Every time my wife talks to him,” Al Jenkins, a longtime friend and current staffer, told me in 2020, “she says, ‘Who is she, and when are we going to meet her?’”

Now, three years later, I had the same questions. Six friends I spoke with said they didn’t know about a woman in his life. Others never returned my calls. The campaign, of course, was well aware that I was trying to get to the bottom of Scott’s love life. They were polite, but not exactly eager to spill.

Finally, with one debate out of the way and the end of summer approaching, Scott’s campaign did agree to make the principal available for a brief interview on the subject.

And so, two weeks ago, I flew to South Carolina to ask a 57-year-old presidential candidate whether he had a girlfriend.

“If I had my druthers, we wouldn’t be doing this,” Scott said.

We were sitting at a conference table at the DoubleTree hotel in North Charleston. Scott was looking sharp in a blue suit with no tie. His head was freshly shaved. A security guard stood sentry outside the door, and Scott was flanked by three different spokespeople. The whole thing felt a little like a one-man news conference, or perhaps a deposition. He came armed with talking points about how American voters cared about their own families, not about his family.

“I have been very protective of my family and my loved ones,” he told me. “I signed up for this. If we make it, she will be signing up for it as well, but at least then she’ll know what she’s getting into. But until then, the only conversation I’m going to have about her in any form or fashion is right now.”

For months, Scott explained, a friend from church had been trying to set him up with a woman the friend knew. Scott had told him that he wasn’t ready for a relationship. Then, late last year, the friend texted Scott the woman’s photo.

“You know what?” Scott recalled telling his friend after seeing the picture. “I’ve prayed on it. Tell me about her again?”

He got the woman’s number. They started talking, hitting it off with discussions about God and using a phone app to do a Bible study together. Scott said he loved her laugh. They had dinner at a downtown Charleston restaurant. She got the steak, he got the swordfish, and they shared even though, as Scott would later learn, she didn’t care for swordfish. They played pickleball, and Scott was embarrassed to find out that he was the “weak man on the court.”

He wouldn’t tell me her name, and the campaign declined to make her available to chat, even off the record. Technically I can’t verify that she exists, except to note that for a presidential campaign to essentially reverse-catfish America would be insane. (By way of corroboration, DeCasper offered that she’s personally hung out with her at the zoo.)

Scott said he had theories about why other campaigns might want to draw attention to his being single. It’s just a way to “sow seeds of doubt” about his campaign, he said, a way “to say that, ‘That guy isn’t one of us.’”

“It’s like a different form of discrimination or bias,” Scott said. “You can’t say I’m Black, because that would be terrible, so find something else that you can attack.”

Throwing himself into work was always kind of a defense mechanism, he said — a response to watching his parents’ marriage blow up when he was a child. “For me, it was the defining moment of my entire life,” he said. “It creates scar tissue. One thing you can do when that happens is run away or run toward something else. And I ran toward purpose.”

What, other than a photo and some prayerful reflection, might have made Scott decide to run toward a relationship at the same time as he’s running, harder than ever, toward his life’s purpose? A cynic would note that, when a person sets out to run for president, nearly everything they do in the lead-up to the election is done with a campaign in mind, and perhaps Scott thought finding a partner would help his candidacy.

As the interview came to a close, I half expected the door to the conference room to swing open, and for the mystery woman to waltz in for a dramatic reveal.

Then again, Scott isn’t the reality TV guy in the race.

“I can’t imagine dragging her onto the campaign trail unless I have the intention of marrying her,” he said. “I hope that happens, to be honest with you.”

“I guess I should be careful about how I say that,” Scott said, with a sheepish grin. “Strike that comment.”

He laughed. His relationship and campaign were both new. It’s hard to know, this early, if any of this is real.