The doubts are gone now about Virginia: It really is a Democratic state. The election of Ralph Northam, a bland and ideologically fuzzy candidate, as governor is all the proof that was required.
Democrats and outgoing governor Terry McAuliffe have reason to be excited. They were nervous going into yesterday’s election as Republican Ed Gillespie appeared to be running neck-and-neck with Northam. It turned out they had little reason to fret. And now they’re giddy.
Northam won everywhere he needed to and especially in the suburbs of Washington. A Republican needs to win at least 40 percent of the vote in Fairfax, the most populous county in the state. Northam held Gillespie to a meager 31 percent.
After losing a series of special House elections to mediocre GOP candidates earlier this year, Democrats can rejoice that they’ve finally shown signs of a comeback. But they didn’t do it by their preferred tactic: linking Gillespie to the person they loath, President Trump.
Gillespie, a former aide to President George W. Bush and Republican national chairman, succeeded in avoiding any Trump taint. He rarely mentioned Trump—not once in his last debate with Northam—and didn’t invite him to campaign in Virginia, though Trump was itching to come. Instead, he got Vice President Mike Pence to speak at a rally in rural southwest Virginia.
In Republican circles, Gillespie’s avoidance of Trump is now likely to spark a noisy debate: Was it a mistake to keep the president away? We’ll never know. But the best guess is it made no difference. Virginia, after all, was the only Southern state Trump lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and there’s no evidence his popularity has grown there since then.
Northam had a couple of special advantages in the race. Virginia has a tradition of electing governors from the party that doesn’t hold the White House. And the Washington Post, which circulates across the northern counties, has disliked Virginia Republicans for decades and covers them brutally.
When Gillespie accused Northam of favoring sanctuary cities that could allow the Latino gang MS-13 to prosper, the Post went ballistic. In an editorial endorsing Northam it blasted Gillespie for allegedly encouraging the “racial inflammatory tendencies” of his party’s base.
McAuliffe, not a modest man, is sure to take credit for the Northam’s election. He deserves it. Attorney General Mark Herring was eager to run, but McAuliffe forced him to stay out. (Herring was reelected AG.) And when former congressman Tom Perriello jumped in the race, McAuliffe backed Northam, his lieutenant governor, to the hilt.
Like the question of Trump’s non-role, the election of Northam raises its own question: How liberal a governor might he be? As recently as a half-dozen years ago, Republicans tried to talk him into switching parties. They failed, but they certainly believed Northam was conservative enough to fit in on their side.
But like the Democratic party, Northam has drifted to the left in the past few years, at times reluctantly. And his campaign had no particular theme. What he’ll do as governor is anybody’s guess.
Virginia requires governors to leave after one term. So McAuliffe is eager to run for president in 2020. Should Northam become a successful moderate-to-liberal governor, that will give McAuliffe something to brag about.
