President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., weeks ago, at a luncheon with the foreign press, was asked who he’d back for the top job when his term runs out. He didn’t dodge so much as shrug. He doesn’t know yet, he said. Too early. But he told the room what he’s looking for anyway: someone who can keep his anti-corruption push alive after he’s gone.

It wasn’t the first hint. Months earlier, at a regional economic forum, he’d described his ideal successor in almost technical terms — someone who understands how economies work, how jobs get made, how inflation gets tamed, how a country keeps itself fed.

Asked whether this person sits in his Cabinet, in a local government post or in the legislature, he laughed the question off. Some names on his list, he admitted, have already said no.

That same trip produced a smaller, stranger tell: a wardrobe choice in a provincial city, read by the political class as a wink toward a local official — one whose name keeps surfacing as a possible challenger to the country’s most popular politician, a vice president whose numbers now outpace the president’s own.

That gap is the real story. An international research house’s assessment, obtained by a national broadsheet, found the vice president pulling ahead amid fallout from an infrastructure corruption scandal and warned the president could be heading into a long lame-duck stretch. Two years is a long runway, the analysts hedged — plenty of time for the numbers to move again.

So who actually matches the description the president gave? Strip away the frontrunners currently dominating the polls, and the list of people who fit “understands economics” narrows to a handful of technocrats, as related to Nosy Tarsee.

A Palace bigshot with Senate experience, a tax committee stalwart in the lower house, a former central bank governor now past his prime campaigning years, a one-time presidential candidate with a Cabinet-heavy résumé, and a retired planning chief with credentials but no machine.

None of them polled above rounding error today. But none of the frontrunners was who the president described either.

Marcos was probably drawing a job description, and somewhere in his thin bench sits the person he was actually talking about.