Ed Gillespie ran a perfect campaign for an election that didn’t happen. Ralph Northam ran a sloppy campaign with the same election in mind. Northam won, no thanks to his own efforts, and will become governor of Virginia in January.
We all know politics is unfair, volatile, and often unpredictable. But Virginia was a special case. Pollsters, pundits, so-called political experts, and aides and advisers to Gillespie and Northam—in other words, everyone—thought the race between the two colorless candidates was neck-and-neck on Election Day.
Gillespie appeared to have been quite successful in avoiding being linked to President Trump. He managed this by pretending Trump didn’t exist and thus giving no thought to the president’s endorsement, which he got anyway.
He followed to a T the Republican playbook for winning in a Democratic state with a prosperous upper class and large minority and immigrant communities. He spent months establishing himself as nonideological and able to appeal to moderate, independent, and college-educated voters.
In the closing weeks, he took a tougher line and attacked Northam’s support for sanctuary cities and restoration of voting rights to ex-felons. For this, the media said he was “Trumpian.” He wasn’t. The anti-crime ads were standard fare in campaigns.
Northam had been pulled to the left by his primary opponent Tom Perriello, a Bernie Sanders endorsee. Liberals were upset when they learned Northam had voted twice for George W. Bush for president and had been approached by Republicans eager for him to switch parties. Northam eased their minds by attacking Trump furiously.
But later he drifted rightward. He flipped on sanctuary cities, saying he never liked them. And his campaign seemed to have no point except getting him elected. It was as if he expected the Virginia tradition of electing governors from the opposite party of the president to carry him to victory.
That tradition may have helped, but practically everything else the candidates did had no bearing on the outcome. An electorate with a chunk of voters waiting for a problem-solving, moderate-sounding Republican to fall in love with didn’t materialize. That alone doomed Gillespie.
What did develop was a massive anti-Trump undertow leading to a wave election. Such elections, like stock market crashes, are unforeseen and startling. It meant a great deal of what Gillespie and Northam did in the campaign was meaningless. The effect on voters was nil. The media’s impact was also negligible.
The exit poll found that one-third of voters were motivated by the opportunity to send a message to Trump—and not a favorable one. This explains why a boring campaign produced a record turnout that swelled to 2.6 million from 2.2 million four years ago. Northam got more votes than a candidate for governor of Virginia ever had.
Democrats rode “a wave of liberal resentment toward President Trump while also promising rational governance to centrist swing voters,” according to Paul Kane of the Washington Post.
Rational governance? I doubt that’s what moderates had in mind in voting for Northam. Moderates are capable of disliking Trump too. And they surely found Northam, a former Army doctor and lieutenant governor for the past four years, more palatable than a liberal candidate. In the exit poll, 64 percent of voters who identified themselves as moderates voted for Northam.
“Throughout the course of the Virginia campaign, Northam was never beholden to the Democratic party’s loudest, most liberal voices, as evidenced by his shift on sanctuary cities,” Douglas Schoen, a Democratic pollster and consultant, noted.
Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics thinks the possibility of an anti-Trump wave should have been expected, given his loss in Virginia to Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points in 2016 and low popularity today. Trende identified “unthinkability bias” as a cause for analysts’ surprise. This was especially true in the case of the Democratic surge in state legislative races. The GOP’s 66-34 seat majority in the House of Delegates was wiped out in a day.
Republicans now will argue over whether Gillespie should have embraced Trump and invited him to Virginia. But that’s a losing proposition. That would have created a bigger wave.
Henry Olsen, writing in City Journal, says now that Virginia is solidly blue, “Republicans can win statewide only if they run campaigns that appeal to non-conservative, college-educated voters.” But that’s what Gillespie did.
The solution resides with Trump. It’s simple: Mr. President, change your behavior.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
