Charlottesville, Trump’s response reshape Virginia gubernatorial race

FALLS CHURCH, Va. — The bloody white supremacist rally in Charlottesville has thrust race and history to the forefront of this year’s campaign for governor in Virginia, a tradition-bound state whose identity has always been rooted in a past as proud for some residents as it is painful for others.

The gubernatorial race in this swing state was already set to be the next big test of the nation’s politics, its results inevitably to be read as a harbinger for the 2018 midterm elections and President Donald Trump’s fate. But the events last weekend in one of its historical centers — in the city that Thomas Jefferson called home and on the university campus he designed and founded — ensure the nation’s highest-profile campaign this fall will also be fought, in part, along the highly combustible lines of racial politics.

With Trump defending Confederate statues and his former top strategist, Steve Bannon, openly inviting Democrats to continue focusing on the issue of removing monuments, the president will loom large over the commonwealth in November.

It is a course that leaves both parties somewhat discomfited, because of both Virginia’s bifurcated demography and the cautious nature of the two candidates.

After last weekend’s violence, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, the Democratic nominee for governor, has firmed up his call to take down Confederate monuments in the state where much of the Civil War was fought and where so many Confederate leaders, now memorialized in marble, emerged.

Northam said in an interview “an awakening” had taken place in Virginia after the Charlottesville violence, which left one woman dead, many more wounded and a liberal college town convulsing.

“We have to be sensitive to all people’s feelings and represent all Virginians,” he said, criticizing his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, for not “denouncing the president” by name after Trump asserted there were good people marching alongside Nazi sympathizers and Klansmen last weekend.

Yet Northam has little appetite to make Virginia’s counties and cities uproot their memorials to the Confederacy and said the decision should remain up to the localities.

Gillespie also believes local communities should make that decision. He argues the statues should remain in place, but include added context clarifying that the lost cause they represent would have perpetuated slavery, not just the euphemistic “states’ rights” preferred by some traditionalists.

“Rather than glorifying their objects, the statues should be instructional,” Gillespie said in a lengthy written statement last week.

In an illustration of Virginia’s complicated politics, and the expectations of each party’s base, it is Northam, a descendant of slaveholders and a product of Virginia’s rural eastern shore, who is calling for the statues to come down, while Gillespie, a New Jersey native who moved to northern Virginia after establishing a political career in Washington, is more closely aligned with the old guard.

Each, though, hails from the establishment wing of his party. And the specter of an election shifting from a hard-fought but aboveboard clash over taxes, health care and the economy to an explosive debate about race and identity makes officials in both campaigns uneasy.

Democrats, while encouraged about having a tool to mobilize black voters in an off-year election, are cognizant of national polling that shows opposition to removing Confederate monuments is bipartisan. They also fear that conservative whites may come out in higher numbers to register their opposition.

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, spoke for the more reticent in his party last week when he suggested they were better off keeping the focus on the more politically safe topic of neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Democrats worry about Trump’s attempt to shift the debate to Confederate monuments and a slippery-slope argument toward tearing down memorials to slaveholding Founding Fathers.

“We have to be sensitive to all people’s feelings and represent all Virginians.”

– LT. GOV. RALPH NORTHAM, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR “Rather than glorifying their objects, the statues should be instructional.”

– ED GILLESPIE, REPBUBLICAN CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR