The Manafort factor in the Virginia election

One guy Ed Gillespie won’t be asking for an election day endorsement is Virginia resident Paul Manafort.

Gillespie, the Republican candidate for governor in the Old Dominion, is playing quite a game. He very much wants all the Donald Trump supporters to come out this coming Tuesday, Nov. 7, and vote for him but, at the same time, he doesn’t want to appear too close to Trump himself.

{mosads}It’s alright for Vice President Mike Pence to campaign for and with him, but the president, that’s entirely a different matter.

To beat Democrat Ralph Northam, Gillespie must win the votes of independents. There is no party registration in Virginia, but voters who consider themselves neither Democratic nor Republican are not terribly fond of the president, according to public-opinion polls.

Gillespie can’t win if he just counts on Republicans. There aren’t enough of them. In the Republican primary, in June, he barely beat Corey Stewart.

Stewart unabashedly calls himself “Trump before Trump.” In the GOP primary, Stewart labeled Gillespie as “Establishment Ed.” This tactic almost worked.

Rural and small-town voters voted overwhelmingly for Stewart. Gillespie needs these voters, and his “A” rating from the NRA, he hopes, will make it easier for them to hold their nose and vote for him.

But Gillespie fully realizes that the state is definitely moving from purple to blue. The GOP has not won a statewide race since 2009.

The current governor is a Democrat.

The lieutenant governor, Northam, is a Democrat.

The attorney general is a Democrat.

In the last three presidential elections, the Democratic candidate won the state. 

Finally, Hillary Clinton won only one southern state. It was Virginia. And she won by 5 points. 

To top it off, both U.S. senators are Democrats — Mark Warner and 2016 vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine.

Gillespie does have one thing going for him. Turnout in off-off-year elections like this one are totally different than in presidential years.

In 2016 the turnout was 72 percent of registered voters. The last time there was a governor’s race, the turnout was a dramatically lower 43 percent.

The Virginia voters in gubernatorial elections are older, whiter and distinctly more conservative.

Tom Davis, the former Virginia congressman and former chairman of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, is a veritable walking, talking encyclopedia on American politics. In an interview, he stressed that “Ed knows how to run a campaign” but he never came out and said Gillespie would win.

Talking to Davis, you get the distinct impression that he wishes Gillespie had the juice to excite his party. He points out that Northam’s down-home Southern accent will draw voters to him and that his Hampton Roads constituency is definitely a plus.

Davis reminded me of Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016 in Northern Virginia — 380,000 votes. Now, turnout will not be nearly as great this year as two years ago, but the potential for landslide numbers for Democrat Northam in this part of the state can’t be overlooked. 

Northern Virginia is one-third of the state’s total vote.

Larry Roberts, a key Tim Kaine advisor in Kaine’s successful 2005 governor’s race, points to two Republican-held elective offices in Northern Virginia which went from Republican to Democratic when turnout tripled. This is a good sign for Dems.

Davis pointed out that the anti-Trump base has demonstrated clout. There have been, according to Davis, eight state legislative races across the country since the presidential election of 2016. In these “special elections,” Democrats have won all eight.

Anything that energizes the anti-Trump vote will be a boon to Democrat Northam. The indictments brought by Robert Mueller a week before the Virginia election reminds every voter there is more to come. This excites and incites the anti-Trump voter. 

If you believe that, in life and especially in politics, “timing is everything,” then the indictment of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort couldn’t have come at a better time for Ralph Northam.

I’ll concede Davis’ point that Ed Gillespie knows how to run a campaign. But, quite possibly, he didn’t know how to run his own campaign.

Anti-Trump Democrats who needed a last-minute push of adrenalin received it in the name of Paul Manafort.

Mark Plotkin is a contributor to the BBC on American politics and a columnist for The Georgetowner. He previously worked as the political analyst for WAMU-FM, Washington’s NPR affiliate, and for WTOP-FM, Washington’s all-news radio station. He is a winner of the Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in writing.