What the Virginia governor’s election means for ...
... Trumpism and the Republican Party ... future Democratic Party nominees
Among the big questions going into Tuesday’s elections were these: Would President Donald Trump’s unique combination of racism, authoritarianism and embrace of unpopular GOP policies energize Democratic voters sufficiently to overcome their tendency to stay home in off-year elections? And would Trumpism rev up Republican voters enough to keep pace with or possibly supplant that energy?
We now have resounding answers to both questions: Yes, and no. Democrat Ralph Northam defeated Republican Ed Gillespie in the Virginia gubernatorial contest by 54 percent to 45 percent, a decisive rout by any measure.
Democratic pollsters tell me the results are causing them to rethink basic assumptions about next year’s elections. They pointed to two major factors in Tuesday’s victory: Northam’s largerthan-expected share of the college-educated white vote and the off-the-charts turnout relative to previous off-years. Northam’s win was driven in part by massive turnout in suburban and exurban areas heavily populated by college-educated whites.
Gillespie attempted a double game: using Trumpist race-baiting appeals to energize the deepred southwestern counties while playing the temperamentally safe establishment Republican to reassure swing and more educated suburban voters. At bottom, this was a test of whether Trump-era Republicans can avoid alienating more educated constituencies while galvanizing Trump voters who crave something more than the usual plutocracy peddled with limited government platitudes.
But Geoff Garin, Northam’s pollster, says the double game failed. Meanwhile, some polling had shown the race-baiting might have energized Democratic constituencies. Gillespie’s strategy did allow him to run up enormous margins in deep-red counties. But preliminary analyses suggest he was unable to drum up the enthusiasm levels seen in Democratic strongholds.
To be sure, Democrats did not improve among working-class white voters, and this is something to worry about. But the Democratic edge among college-educated white voters, and the surprisingly juiced-up turnout, suggest trends that could have a big impact next year. “You start to rethink the ceiling on the number of college-educated whites that Democrats can get,” Nick Gourevitch, a pollster for the Democratic Governors Association, told me. “That changes the map.”
One under-reported item in the analysis of Tuesday’s election has been the kind of candidate Ralph Northam was in Virginia; specifically, from the Republican point of view, what kind of candidate he was not.
Northam was not the candidate Republicans hoped to see emerge from his Democratic Party primary contest against liberal darling Tom Perriello. Unlike the new-era Bernie-ites who have no sense of how government works, Northam is an experienced, sensible and mostly thoughtful candidate.
And it is worth noting that in 2017’s marquee races for mayor of New York, governor of New Jersey and governor of Virginia, the winners were all stylistically similar Democrats. Attacking them as leftists is challenging. Northam in particular wasn’t a good “bad guy” for Republicans. He wasn’t the stereotype Republicans hope to see.
Republicans get ourselves worked up about the Democrats’ fealty to grievance groups such as Black Lives Matter, Antifa, etc. But none of that imagery was present in Northam’s persona.
That said, Northam’s win in Virginia makes asking the question “Who will the Democrats nominate in 2018?” all that more pressing. Throughout the country, Democrats have become increasingly emboldened in their use of identity politics to create fissures within American society. But in Northam’s case, he is a reassuring character who doesn’t seem threatening to affluent Republican suburbanites. And while we’re at it, the same can be said of someone like Doug Jones, the Democrats’ candidate for Senate in Alabama. I still think Roy Moore will win, but I’ve spent some time at home in Alabama recently and have been surprised Ed Rogers is a contributor to The Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog and a political consultant. Follow him on Twitter: @EdRogersDC