Some winning campaigns are late-breaking. The most famous is Ronald Reagan’s surge in the last two weeks of the 1980 presidential campaign. And some candidates are elected after being far behind. Mitch McConnell trailed Democratic senator Dee Huddleston by as much as 30 percentage points in 1984, then won narrowly. To capture the Virginia governorship in 1993, George Allen had to erase a gap of 29 percentage points.
Republican Ed Gillespie’s campaign in Virginia against Democratic senator Mark Warner is already late-breaking. A month ago, a poll by Christopher Newport University put him behind Warner, 53-31 percent. “Warner has solid Democratic support, but also strong support from ideologically moderate and conservative voters,” the Newport pollster said.
Now Gillespie has cut Warner’s lead to 50-41 percent in a Quinnipiac poll. “You can’t completely dismiss his chances,” Quinnipiac’s Peter Brown said. “But no one should forget just how popular Mark Warner has been in Virginia over the past decade. . . . It will be a good deal tougher to go from 9 down to up anything.”
Tougher, but not impossible. Gillespie is running for office for the first time, but he’s an experienced politician. He spent a decade as an aide to House majority leader Dick Armey, was Republican national chairman, then a Washington lobbyist, took a pay cut to serve as an adviser to President George W. Bush for two years, and was a senior adviser to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012.
The Quinnipiac poll showed Gillespie has room to grow among Republicans and in populous northern Virginia. He got only 78 percent of the Republican vote in the poll, while Warner was favored by 15 percent of Republicans and 94 percent of Democrats. Attracting more Republicans shouldn’t be a stretch for Gillespie.
The Washington suburbs in north-ern Virginia are another story. It’s been a graveyard for GOP candidates—for George Allen’s Senate bid in 2012, Romney in 2012, and Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli in 2013.
Quinnipiac put Gillespie’s support in four counties and the city of Alexandria in northern Virginia at 30 percent and Warner’s at 60 percent. Reversion to the mean would move Gillespie closer to 40 percent.
There’s a reason for Gillespie’s weak showing there. His strategy has emphasized all of Virginia outside the Washington area—until now. He didn’t buy Washington TV time until September 25. If he has the funds to stay on the air for the final month of the campaign and if conservative super-PACs get involved, he could pick up significant support in northern Virginia, particularly from Republicans and independents who had been inclined to vote for Warner.
“We have a plan to get Ed’s message out and win,” spokesman Paul Logan said. “We have the resources to do that. I won’t telegraph where we will be spending money on TV over the last month.” Warner has outspent Gillespie 3-to-1 on TV so far, Logan said.
And Gillespie is likely to benefit from the complacency of the Warner campaign. For most of the year, the press has treated Warner’s reelection as a certainty, and he acts like he believes it is. There was speculation that Gillespie was running merely as a prelude to a future race in which he’d have a better chance of winning. With his improved poll numbers, that speculation has died. Gillespie says it was never true.
One of his ads in the Washington market is a hardy perennial of the 2014 campaign. It features a video of Warner saying he’d never vote for a reform that would “take away health care that you’ve got right now or a health care plan that you like.” With the Warner video behind him in the ad, Gillespie says: “Mark Warner helped pass Obamacare, denying families the insurance and doctors we trust. I’ll replace Obamacare with market reforms that create jobs, pull down costs, and let us keep our insurance and our doctors.”
A second Gillespie ad attacks Warner for claiming he’s bipartisan. In a Warner ad, the word “bipartisan” shows up three times and “working across the aisle” once. He fails to mention he’s a Democrat. In his TV spot, Gillespie says Warner votes with the president 97 percent of the time. “That’s not bipartisan.”
With the race tightening, Warner has revived a largely forgotten issue, Enron. “The largest corporate fraud in history. Ed Gillespie was their lobbyist,” Warner’s new ad says. Warner earlier in the campaign cited Enron in billboards and a debate. However, “this six-figure statewide ad buy is by far Warner’s most direct and substantial attack on Gillespie’s career as a lobbyist,” the Washington Post reported.
The Gillespie response was terse. “Attacking Ed over a client company at his bipartisan firm 13 years and four jobs ago is the definition of hypocrisy, since it’s a company Warner himself owned stock in at the time,” said Gillespie spokesman Logan.
Gillespie insists he never expected to be a threat to Warner until late in the campaign. “There’s a lot of hares out there and I’m not one of them,” he told me. “I’m the tortoise.”
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
