Trumpism Stumbles in Virginia, and Republicans Fall to a Democratic Wave

This article originally appeared on this site.

In 2017, the politics in every state have been tribal and atavistic, but nowhere so much as in Virginia. In August, extremists staged a horrifying rally in Charlottesville that began with young men gathering under Nazi flags and ended in murder. In October, the race for governor in the state devolved into a stark and bitter contest about Virginia’s racial identity, in which the Republican candidate, Ed Gillespie, resorted to a campaign of fear that focussed on Salvadoran immigrant gangsters and support for Confederate monuments, while groups supporting the Democratic candidate, Ralph Northam, paid for an ad in which a white man tries to run a diverse group of children over with a truck. The election was supposed to be close (the polls had slightly favored Northam, but the momentum was understood to be with Gillespie), yet by early in the evening on Tuesday, it was obviously a Democratic rout—Northam won by an astonishing nine percentage points. “The Democrats are back,” crowed Tom Perez, the Democratic National Committee chair, whose own job had been rumored to be at risk if Northam had lost. It may have been premature to declare a turn in national politics, but one looked very much to have occurred in Virginia. The anger of the past few months did not deepen the divisions between liberals and conservatives there. Instead, it triggered a general suburban revulsion, and a Democratic wave.

Northam, who is only fifty-eight years old but grandfatherly in mien, had probably been underestimated as a candidate. But the election results, once the votes were in, were bigger than any one candidate, even the one at the top of the ticket. Democrats had started the day holding just thirty-four of the hundred seats in the state’s House of Delegates, but by the end of the evening, with some absentee ballots still to be counted and recounted, the Party seemed likely to win between forty-nine and fifty-one seats, a result that, a few hours earlier, no one in Virginia politics had imagined.

Gillespie did fine where he had been expected to—in rural Virginia—but Northam and the Democrats ran up historic margins in the state’s suburbs. In suburban Richmond, a thirty-two-year-old civics teacher won a seat that Democrats had only contested once since 1997. In Manassas, a young Marine veteran and member of the Democratic Socialists of America defeated the House majority whip. In Prince William County—the outer Washington suburbs—two Latina women beat Republican incumbents and will become the first Latinas to ever serve in the House of Delegates. In that same county, a socially conservative delegate who had introduced a bill restricting which bathrooms transgender people could use was defeated by a trans woman named Danica Roem.

The story of this election was supposed to be the scorched-earth culture war that Gillespie had orchestrated in October, when his campaign advertisements skipped from one Fox News talking point to the next. Gillespie had declined to invite President Trump, who is unpopular in Virginia, to campaign with him, but he had run on Trump’s themes. As he drew nearer to Northam in the polls, Republicans had begun to suggest that his campaign would be a model going into next year’s midterms. “Trumpism without Trump can show the way forward,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, insisted this weekend. That does not seem so likely now.

The questions now will be about whether even Trump can afford to stay loyal to Trumpism. Since last year, the President’s leverage over Congress has depended in part upon the belief that Republican voters now identified more strongly with Trump than with conservative ideology or the Party. The way for Republican candidates to win office, this thinking goes, is to stick to Trump’s themes. But Gillespie embraced those themes and he and his party were routed. Part of the difference may simply be that a Trump Presidency is no longer an abstraction. He has led a unified government for nearly a year, and has yet to sign a meaningful piece of legislation. He has associated himself with an extraordinarily unpopular position on health care, and is now doing so again on taxes. His former campaign chairman has just been indicted, and it seems likely that his former national-security adviser will be, too. He has griped publicly about the Senate Majority Leader, the Speaker of the House, and his own Attorney General—and attacked the few members of his party who have deigned to criticize him. Tuesday night, he tried to blame Gillespie for the loss. “Ed Gillespie did not embrace me or what I stand for,” the President tweeted, once the results were in. “We will continue to win, bigger than before!” “LOL,” Tom Perez, the Democratic chair, tweeted in response, followed by the emoji for laughing and crying at once.

The President has spent the past two and half years, out of office and in, insisting that the way forward for America is to move backward, to a whitewashed image of the mid-twentieth century. He wakes up this morning in a nation where a Liberian refugee is the mayor of Helena, Montana. While Virginians were going to the polls, the President was in South Korea, where he gave a loopy speech to the national legislature praising, at length, the achievements of Korean golfers. Trump also delivered a warning to North Korea: “Don’t try us.” But whom was he claiming to speak for? On Election Day, two more Republican congressmen retired. In the maps of the 2016 election results that the President reportedly likes to hand out at the White House, Trump’s coalition seems as vast as the American interior. Tuesday evening, as the President flew from South Korea to China while Virginia turned against his party, Trumpism seemed small enough that all its partisans could fit on Air Force One.

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