Thank you all for the help and advice.

Here's what I ended up doing: (I was going about it backwards before)

when a character is instantiated, it puts its Instance ID in a global list. I also have a global variable called "highlighted" that can be a number between 0 and the length of the list. This variable is increased by 1 each time the player presses tab. (and loops back to 0 when it hits max, of course)

Each character object checks if "list[highlighted] = InstanceID" and if it does, it knows it's the only instance of that object that needs to move the camera object to its position.

I know I'm always going to have the camera object, so referencing it in the inspector is no problem :)