Ed Gillespie on Tuesday was readying to pivot from the Republican primary to the inhospitable terrain of a general election dominated by President Trump’s low approval ratings.
In Virginia’s gubernatorial nominating contest, Gillespie was expected to easily defeat Corey Stewart, the Prince William County Council chairman, and state Sen. Frank Wagner. Wagner ran as a pragmatic outsider, Stewart as a Trump acolyte who challenged Gillespie from the right, but neither ever developed momentum.
Next up for Gillespie is the winner of a competitive Democratic primary: either Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, backed by outgoing Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who has 2020 ambitions, or former Congressman Tom Perriello, preferred by far-left progressives.
Historically, the party in power in the White House loses Virginia’s gubernatorial election, although McAuliffe won four years ago on the heels of President Barack Obama’s re-election. That, and Trump’s 43 percent approval rating in one June poll, present hurdles for Gillespie in this blue battleground state.
A Republican operative and veteran of Virginia campaigns said that Trump chaotic leadership and provocative Twitter habit risks “distracting” from Gillespie’s kitchen table message of jobs and economic growth.
“All the press will do is ask questions: Do you agree with this or that tweet? And, they won’t be asking questions that are substantive in the context of the race for governor,” this GOP operative said, on condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly.
Gillespie, a longtime Republican insider who served under President George W. Bush and came close to knocking off Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., in 2014, wasn’t yet looking past the primary.
“I feel confident we’ll win the nomination,” Gillespie told conservative radio talk show host John Fredericks, who broadcasts throughout southern and central Virginia. “We have the wind at our back.”
Fredericks was among Trump’s first supporters in the commonwealth during the 2016 presidential race. Though the talk show host agrees that Gillespie faces an uphill battle, he takes issue with the notion that the president will hamstring the Republican’s chances.
Trump lost the state to Democrat Hillary Clinton, and is weak in Northern Virginia, which can dictate the outcome of statewide elections.
But Fredericks said the vitriol from the Left directed toward Trump, and adopted in the primary by Northam and Perriello, is raising the ire of Trump’s base there, and he predicted that it would boost GOP turnout in November.
“As fired up as the Democrat resistance is, the untold story of this entire cycle is that Trump voters are equally animated and they’re going to turn out on Nov. 8,” Fredericks told the Washington Examiner in a telephone interview. “They feel this president has been treated unfairly, they’re motivated, and they’re going to turnout in a huge number. If they do that, Ed Gillespie is going to win.”
Gillespie has assiduously courted all GOP voting blocs, managing to offend very few of them. The question is whether he can hold them while appealing to independents and soft Democrats and navigating the Trump factor.
Democrats are comforted in the belief that Gillespie won’t be able to pull it off.
But first, they have to resolve their primary, a tossup between the establishment forces behind Northam, who was running as a pragmatic centrist before Perriello pushed him to the left, and the former congressman.
Perriello, an ex-State Department official under Obama, has been endorsed by the portion of the liberal base that has coalesced behind Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a grassroots organization, activated its network in Virginia on behalf of Perriello. “It’s clear that momentum is on the side of the grassroots Resistance, and Tom Perriello has tapped into that energy with his campaign. Tom Perriello has the backbone to fight back against Trump’s assault on our rights and values,” PCCC spokesman Kaitlin Sweeney said.
He is ahead in most recent polls, holding a slim lead in the averages of 2.3 percentage points. Still, Democratic insiders are predicting a narrow Northam victory. The lieutenant governor was endorsed by the Washington Post, considered influential in Northern Virginia’s Washington, D.C., suburbs.
“What we’ve seen in Democratic primaries, is that it’s been a battle of who will fight back against Donald Trump the strongest,” said a Democratic operative monitoring the race. “As far as the general election, that works out alright for us in state where” his approvals are low.
