A
decade before Donald Trump upended national politics, Ed Gillespie was
among the establishment Republicans counselling his party’s candidates
to tread gently on the issue of immigration or risk ruination by
alienating Latinos.
Now he is Virginia’s Republican nominee for
governor, sounding remarkably like Trump as he speaks from a hay
bale-laden stage at the Washington County fairgrounds in southwest
Virginia. The president won 75% of the vote in this part of the state,
and Gillespie is trying to prove that an establishment Republican still
can succeed under the shadow of Trump.
“Do we need to have sanctuary
cities here in Virginia?” Gillespie asked the crowd, raising an issue he
has highlighted in ads that feature heavily tattooed Latinos and
threats of menacing gangs.
“No, we don’t!” the crowd shouted back, and he added firmly: “No, we don’t.”
The
ads are not subtle. “MS-13’s motto is Kill. Rape. Control,” blares one.
“Ralph Northam’s policy? Northam cast the deciding vote in favour of
sanctuary cities that let illegal immigrants who commit crimes back on
the street, increasing the threat of MS-13.”
Northam, the state’s
lieutenant governor and the Democratic candidate, did vote against a ban
on sanctuary cities in a procedural move engineered by his Republican
opponents. But Virginia does not have any sanctuary cities, and those
that exist elsewhere do not allow immigrants arrested for major crimes
back on the street.
Gillespie portrayed a very different image a day
later at a high school in Nokesville, an exurb in Northern Virginia, the
region whose booming growth has propelled the state to a persistent
blue tint in recent elections. He cited his father’s journey from
Ireland as an 8-year-old as he defended young immigrants brought here by
their parents and protected until recently by a programme Trump has
rescinded.
While his father immigrated legally, Gillespie said, young immigrants brought here without proper papers should not be punished.
“They
did not make that decision” to cross the border, he told about 1,500
members of an interfaith group at a joint appearance with Northam. “They
should not be deported.”
Both parties’ candidates have balancing
acts to pursue in advance of the election here, now just over two weeks
away. Both acts involve Trump.
Northam must find a way to keep
turnout high among minorities and liberals, riled up by the president,
without turning off more moderate voters. Gillespie’s problem, one that
many Republicans will face in the year ahead, is to reinvent himself as a
candidate for the Trump era.
Gillespie’s sanctuary city ads are part
of a strategy meant to prove that winning is still possible for
candidate who by most definitions should be out of favour among his
party’s most avid activists. His gamble is that he can adopt just enough
of Trump’s message to satisfy the president’s GOP supporters while
creating enough distance to placate everyone else.
The strain
sometimes shows: Speakers at the Washington County event emphasised
their grievances against former president Barack Obama rather than
delving deeply into Gillespie’s background. That is because Gillespie is
precisely what Trump ran against - a legendary Washington lobbyist, a
former counsellor to president George W Bush and chairman of the
Republican National Committee, a lifelong representative of a party
establishment that Trump has done his best to demolish.
Trump may be
generally unpopular in Virginia, but he still looms large, as he does
everywhere else, whether the candidates like it or not.
“I feel like
it’s a referendum on President Trump,” said Cornell Williams, a
37-year-old high school administrator who lives in Prince William
County, a key decider in Virginia elections. He described Trump’s
presidency as an exhausting “circus sideshow.”
“The presidential election took so much energy,” he said. “A lot of people are dealing with the aftermath.”
For
Republican candidates in contested states like Virginia, the fact that
everything revolves around Trump raises two vexingly opposite scenarios:
Every day brings the potential for a Trump tempest that could alter the
election by riling Democrats – or by energising Republicans.
So far,
Gillespie has publicly ignored Trump even as he’s borrowed many of the
president’s favourite themes – or, as Democratic Governor Terry
McAuliffe put it at a Northam rally in Richmond on Thursday, he has
treated “the president of his party like a communicable disease.” Trump
endorsed him via a pair of tweets, an alliance Gillespie seldom talks
about, although he welcomed Vice-President Mike Pence to Washington
County.
On the other side, Northam’s lead feels less comfortable than Democrats might have hoped.
Most
often, Virginia elects governors of the party that lost the
presidential contest the year before. No Republican has won a
top-of-the-ticket statewide race since 2009. (Virginia elects its
governor every four years, for a single term.) The last three
presidential elections have gone to Democrats, with Hillary Clinton
winning by more than 5 points.
But to nervous Democrats, a more
important factor is the huge drop-off in turnout between presidential
contests and state races. According to the Virginia Department of
Elections, 72% of registered voters cast ballots in 2016. In the last
governor’s race, in 2013, only 43% voted. The smaller electorate is
generally older and more conservative, like one that helped Gillespie
nearly knock off Democratic Sen. Mark Warner in 2014.
The need by
Democrats to pull in younger and more diverse voters - particularly
African-Americans - brought Obama to the Richmond rally.
“Elections
matter. Voting matters,” he told the rapturous crowd. “You can’t take
anything for granted. You can’t sit this one out.”
Earlier in the
campaign, as he worked to dispatch a challenger in the Democratic
primary, Northam, a paediatric neurologist and Army veteran, harshly
condemned Trump, calling him a “narcissistic maniac.” He has now turned
to a more congenial argument.
“If Donald Trump is helping Virginia,
I’ll work with him,” he says in an ad cycling endlessly on the state’s
airwaves. “But Donald Trump has proposed cutting Virginia school
funding, rolling back our clean air and water protections and taking
away healthcare from thousands of Virginians. I’ve stood up to Donald
Trump on all of it. Ed Gillespie refuses to stand up to him at all.”
Northam
also has used a familiar set of social issues to assail Gillespie. One
ad aimed at female voters features audio of Gillespie declaring, “I
would like to see abortion be banned.” (Aides said Gillespie continues
to support exceptions for rape, incest or threat to the life of the
mother.) Since the Las Vegas shooting, Northam also has called for
restrictions on assault weapons - a position not shared by Gillespie.
The
gun issue demonstrates how difficult it can be to merge two distinct
voter blocs. In the suburbs of Northern Virginia, gun control is
popular. In Trump strongholds, gun rights are inviolate.
“Preserve
our history, protect the Second Amendment, preserve our values,”
paramedic James Bardinelli of Bristol, Va, said when asked what he saw
in Gillespie. Bardinelli was helping a friend sell merchandise at the
Washington County event; the best-selling item was a navy sweatshirt
promoting a 2020 ticket: “Trump NRA.”
For both sides, the stakes are
high, said Stephen Farnsworth, a presidential scholar at the University
of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va.
“The Trump people are going
to want to show that Trump is an asset to the Republican Party,” he
said. “And the Democrats would like to show that he is not.” - Tribune
News Service
Ed Gillespie, Virginia’s Republican nominee for governor.