Thread: Why the Virginia Governor's Race Could Echo Across the Country

Why the Virginia Governor's Race Could Echo Across the Country

Ronald Brownstein
Oct 26, 2017

If Republican nominee Ed Gillespie wins, it could inspire candidates to mimic his Trump-like message on crime and immigration in 2018.

The Virginia gubernatorial contest has unexpectedly become a test case of the explosive politics of race in the Donald Trump era. The outcome could tug the Republican Party much further toward Trump-style racial provocation and polarization next year. Or it could warn the GOP that such positioning carries too high a political price among white swing voters and minorities.

Republican nominee Ed Gillespie, a party operative and former lobbyist once considered a relative centrist, has built his campaign around a succession of racially infused attacks against his Democratic opponent, Ralph Northam, the current lieutenant governor. Gillespie has besieged Northam on his opposition to Confederate monuments, and on his support for so-called sanctuary cities, which don’t fully cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and which Gillespie alleges protect the Central American gang MS-13.

Northam now holds a modest lead in virtually all polls. But if Gillespie wins—or even loses only narrowly—in such a diverse and highly educated coastal state, it will inevitably inspire other Republican candidates in the 2018 midterms to emulate his tactics, particularly his attacks on sanctuary cities.

Win or lose, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you see sanctuary-city initiatives on the ballot in as many states as possible next year,” Gene Ulm, Gillespie’s pollster, told me in a recent interview. That prospect underscores the quickly rising stakes for Democrats in this race. Many Democrats initially viewed Gillespie’s emphasis on immigration and crime as a largely defensive move after he nearly lost the GOP primary to Corey Stewart, a Prince William County supervisor who ran a Trump-like campaign that thundered against immigrants and party elites alike.

Since late August, Gillespie has run television ads accusing Northam of casting a tie-breaking vote in the state legislature to defend sanctuary cities. The spots have been widely criticized as misleading because, among other issues, no jurisdiction in Virginia actually qualifies as a sanctuary city. But over images of heavily tattooed Latino men, the ads charge that Northam’s vote “let dangerous illegal immigrants back on the street, increasing the threat of MS-13.” One briefly shows Gillespie talking with an African American police officer, but it ends with him walking with three white policemen—a thin blue line of defense—down what looks like a street in the outer Washington, D.C., suburbs that often decide Virginia elections.

Gillespie has also opposed the removal of Confederate statues, even after the white-nationalist violence that erupted in Charlottesville this summer. And this week, the Republican aired a new ad criticizing outgoing Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe for restoring the voting rights of tens of thousands of felons, a policy that has disproportionately benefited African Americans in the state.

Democrats maintain that Gillespie is taking this Trump-like approach because he doesn’t naturally excite the president’s core constituency of blue-collar and non-urban whites. “Gillespie is a deeply flawed messenger for a populist message,” Geoff Garin, Northam’s pollster, told me. Garin said the Northam campaign’s internal polling shows that Gillespie’s tone, particularly on immigration, is “hurting him” with the many college-educated white voters in the Northern Virginia suburbs.

To that, Ulm responded succinctly: “That’s wishful thinking.” He said the attacks on sanctuary cities “absolutely” are improving Gillespie’s position with white-collar whites. “You wouldn’t see it so much [on television] if we didn’t believe so strongly in it,” he told me. What’s more, Ulm said, Gillespie’s defense of Confederate statues has fortified his standing among suburban whites further south, outside of Richmond, where the issue resonates more powerfully.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...ortham/543984/

I always liked Ed Gillespie, I think he headed the RNC for awhile. Don't know much about him otherwise, but he sounds like he's coming around to the Trump Train on crime and immigration and is against sanctuary cities.