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,” Tom Perez, the Democratic National Committee
chair, whose own job had been rumored to be at risk if Northam had lost, crowed.
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-five-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 ever to 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 for whom was he
claiming to speak? 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.