Ed Gillespie, despite being a Republican running in a bad Republican year in a state trending Democratic, looks poised to win the governorship of Virginia in the Nov. 7 election. If he does, it will be because he has found the political equivalent of what athletes call a “sweet spot” – in his case, meaning a narrow realm of tough-minded decency that unites otherwise-warring Republican factions while appealing to kitchen-table concerns of independents.

For the whole-quarter century I’ve known him professionally (our stints as House leadership staffers in the 1990s coincided), Gillespie has been a solutions-oriented reformer. That’s the attitude, and skill set, he’ll bring to the job as Virginia’s chief executive.