Gillespie’s Narrow Path

This is one of two states (New Jersey is the other) that elect their governors in the year following the presidential election. Serving as a political appetizer to the midterms, the Virginia race always attracts national media attention. And occasionally it rewards that attention with a clue about an impending electoral shift, as in 2009 when Republican Bob McDonnell won in a landslide that presaged the congressional red wave of 2010.

Ed Gillespie is the establishment man’s establishment man. A lifelong GOP operative, he got his start phone-banking at the Republican National Committee in 1985 and rose to chairman. Gillespie served as a White House counselor to George W. Bush, guided McDonnell to his big victory in 2009, and was a senior adviser to Mitt Romney during his 2012 presidential run. Gillespie only took his first steps as a candidate in his own right in 2014 with an unsuccessful run for Mark Warner’s Virginia Senate seat, but he has a wonk’s enthusiasm for policy.

“Our economy is stuck, and it needs to get unstuck,” Gillespie tells the crowd at a rally here in southwest Virginia on October 14, before rattling off a list of areas he says he’ll tackle: unshackling the economy, eliminating poverty, improving schools and public transit, battling the state’s opioid epidemic. “I’ve got plans for everything. I’ve got so many plans, I had to open up a second website.”

Virginia governors are limited to a single four-year term; Gillespie’s opponent, Democratic lieutenant governor Ralph Northam, is as close as the state gets to an incumbent. A pediatrician and former military doctor, he served three terms in the state senate before winning his current post in 2014. He has the true Democrat’s affection for government spending and technological progress, and campaigns on renewable energy and the computer-oriented “jobs of the future,” from data processing to piloting unmanned aircraft. He has enjoyed a respectable lead in the polls for months, and his campaign has as a result been largely focused on not making mistakes.

The Virginia gubernatorial campaign thus appears at first an unremarkable race in a remarkable political time. During their public appearances, Gillespie and Northam trade conventional barbs: The Democrat will bankrupt us with runaway spending, cries Gillespie. The Republican will bankrupt us with irresponsible tax cuts, asserts Northam. The Democrat doesn’t support law enforcement. The Republican doesn’t support the poor.

But these boilerplate tussles belie the central struggle of the election, which takes place when the candidates leave the television studios and head out to engage with voters, who all want to talk about Trump.

The president is a polarizing figure in Virginia as elsewhere. Hillary Clinton carried the state by five points last November. A September Morning Consult poll found Trump’s statewide approval rating to be just 42 percent. But Gillespie has learned firsthand the dangers of ignoring the president’s supporters: In the June primary, he was almost upset by Corey Stewart, onetime state chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign. Stewart ran on the premise that Gillespie was a squish who favored tearing down the state’s Confederate monuments (which he doesn’t). Polls consistently showed Gillespie enjoying a double-digit lead, but he won the primary by less than two points.

Lesson learned. Gillespie’s mission was to find a way to court Trump’s core supporters without alienating more traditional Republicans and independents in the state. He quietly hired the sharp-elbowed Jack Morgan, who has worked with both Trump and Stewart, to help with grassroots outreach. And while Gillespie remained upbeat and affably boring in public appearances, his advertising began to take on a darker and more apocalyptic tone.

“I think the way Gillespie presents himself is still largely the same; in debates or interviews, he generally sounds how he sounded when he ran for the Senate in 2014,” says Geoffrey Skelley, a political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “But his advertising approach has to somewhat be compared to what we saw in the 2016 cycle. .  .  . There’s definitely cause to wonder about dog-whistle politics.”

While early Gillespie ads had focused on policies like tax reform and Gillespie’s own success story—presenting the candidate as the son of an immigrant and a self-made man—in August, the campaign began to release TV spots and mailers highlighting Northam’s support for tearing down Confederate memorials and accusing him of “standing with illegal immigrants” and being soft on violent gangs like MS-13.

It was this last attack, a reference to a tiebreaking vote Northam cast as lieutenant governor earlier this year to kill a bill banning sanctuary cities in Virginia (a symbolic measure, as there are no sanctuary cities in the state), that caught Trump’s eye. On October 5, the president tweeted an endorsement of Gillespie: “Ralph Northam, who is running for Governor of Virginia, is fighting for the violent MS-13 killer gangs & sanctuary cities. Vote Ed Gillespie!”

Northam has denounced the ads as “despicable” and accuses Gillespie of “running a campaign based on hatred and bigotry and fear.” “Look at the legislation I supported when I was in the senate that made stiffer penalties and fines for gang members,” Northam says in an interview. “To say that I’m soft on crime is totally inaccurate.”

Accurate or not, the ads and Trump’s approval seem to have helped Gillespie. He and Northam are now competitive in the polls: While most recent surveys show about a five-point lead for Northam, the latest Monmouth study finds 48 percent of likely voters supporting Gillespie and 47 percent supporting Northam—a four-point improvement for the Republican in a month. Monmouth director Patrick Murray points to Gillespie’s gains in rural Virginia on crime issues as the driving force behind his rising numbers.

The candidate prefers to attribute his polling gains to voters simply growing more familiar with his policies. “I think as people have focused on the race more, they’ve seen there’s been a cumulative impact of the policies I’ve put forward over the last eight or nine months,” Gillespie says. “People see that I’ve got a serious approach to the challenges we face in the commonwealth, and solutions to them, and that that’s what my focus is.”

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The big name at Gillespie’s October 14 rally was Vice President Mike Pence. Abingdon is in ruby-red Washington County, less than 20 miles from the Tennessee border in the Appalachian mountains of southwestern Virginia. Prominent state conservatives took the stage in a corrugated-metal barn to decry the Democratic party and liberal policies ranging from “the war on coal” to toleration for illegal immigration to disrespect for the national anthem. Pence offered Gillespie resounding praise in his remarks, saying he was “on the right side of every issue” and would “never let you down.”

A tension between the speakers’ fiery rhetoric and Gillespie’s more cautious approach was apparent. When the candidate spoke, his detailed policy proposals got polite applause, but he brought down the house when he thanked Pence and Trump for repealing the Clean Power Plan. Abingdon is in the heart of Virginia’s coal country.

Still, the rally was a disappointment for Gillespie: The turnout of around 600 was half what he’d hoped the vice president would draw. And although it was designed to energize the base, the rally alienated some grassroots activists after it was reported that Gillespie’s campaign had barred Jack Morgan, the former Trump operative and a local favorite, from speaking at the event.

“I will guarantee you all this,” Republican activist William Totten wrote on Facebook following the event. “Should Ed ever run for anything in politics again, I will work my every waking moment to make sure he loses the primary.”

If there’s good news for the GOP ticket, it’s that while Trump voters aren’t nearly as enthusiastic about Gillespie as they are about the president, they see Democratic policy as such an existential threat that they’re likely to turn out to vote anyway.

“He’s the lesser of two evils,” says Abingdon resident and erstwhile Stewart supporter Robert Honaker. “I want a stronger stance on the illegals, especially where illegals are voting. We’re losing our country because of this. There’s a lot of big business that likes this cheap labor that the taxpayers are paying to keep. .  .  . We don’t need them in our workforce.” Honaker tells me he has no doubt he’ll vote for Gillespie—in his mind, a Northam victory would mean more illegal immigrants allowed to vote in Virginia and slimmer chances to get candidates like Stewart elected in the future.

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Gillespie’s move to the right, however awkward at times, has placed Northam in a difficult position. He had harsh words for the president during the primary, calling him a “narcissistic maniac.” But once he became the Democratic nominee, Northam opted to focus on painting Gillespie as an out-of-touch Washington insider: Gillespie “was Washington’s lobbyist,” he’s quipped, “and now he’s Mr. Trump’s lobbyist.”

“Nobody wants you to be talking about Donald Trump; you’re not connecting with them,” Northam spokesman David Turner says. “But everybody can understand when you’re talking about your health care, bills are going to rise up, and what that means for what’s going to go on in their lives.” “What was the biggest criticism in the postmortems of Hillary?” he asks. “Almost always, it was she didn’t talk about jobs enough. It was usually like, Donald Trump was always talking about jobs, Hillary Clinton was using identity politics.”

Northam has started to portray Gillespie as a stooge who will enable a dangerous Trump agenda. “This really is the most important election, and it’s because of what we saw in 2016: just a campaign that was based on hatred and bigotry and discrimination and fear, and now what we are watching, which is an embarrassment in Washington,” Northam said at a rally in Virginia Beach on October 17. “And we need to take all of this energy and stand up and say no, no, Mr. Trump. No, Mr. Gillespie. This is not the country that we believe in. .  .  . When we all go out and vote on November 7, we’re going to tell people that believe in hatred and bigotry and discrimination that they can go away, and don’t ever come back!”

It’s a message that has helped erase any lingering doubt about Northam’s candidacy within the Democratic base. The same day as the Pence rally in Abingdon, former vice president Joe Biden joined Northam in Reston at a summit on jobs with local Democratic activists and business leaders. Biden told Northam he had to win “to give people hope we are not falling into this know-nothing pit.”

Liberals of every stripe are coalescing around Northam’s call for unity, having long since gotten over his defeat of a progressive favorite, who was backed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren no less, in the Democratic primary this summer. A ringing endorsement comes from Diana Veazey, a retired minister who once worked at the same children’s hospital as Northam and who attended the Virginia Beach rally. “I don’t know of anybody in this world I have more respect for with his integrity, honesty, his compassion and his caring, and his commitment to support and help people,” she says. “I think he’s one of the most incredible men I’ve ever known.”

For his part, Northam discounts reports of Gillespie gaining ground in polls with a tried-and-true talking point: “The most important poll is on November 7, and there’s a tremendous amount of enthusiasm,” he says. “People are standing up and saying, ‘We’re not going to accept what we saw in 2016; we’re not going to accept that as the new normal.’ ”

The conventional wisdom is it’s Northam’s race to lose. Virginia has gone for the Democrat in the last three presidential elections and three of the last four governor’s races. Both Virginia senators are Democrats. If Gillespie pulls out the upset, it will be a new thing in American politics: an establishment candidate who had his Trumpian cake and ate it, too.

Andrew Egger is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.