The language of our politics has changed since last year’s Presidential
election, but our politicians are mostly the same. The rupture this has
caused—between what elected officials spent their careers preparing for
and what they now find themselves doing—has sometimes been reassuring,
or even funny. (Recall New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, among the
cagiest of Wall Street-friendly centrist Democrats, giving a
gritted-teeth grin during a joint press conference with Bernie Sanders
about free college tuition.) But more often it has been terrifying. Some
lawmakers have rearranged themselves around Donald Trump’s campaign of
white identity, both for and against, but more have tried to straddle
the new fault lines, in the hope, perhaps, that the parties will soon
snap politics back into its old alignment.

In the meantime, we have some strange and compelling elections, in which
both Republican and Democratic candidates at once are trying to
assimilate the emotional intensity of the 2016 campaign while hedging
their careers against it lasting. The marquee race of 2017 is Tuesday’s
gubernatorial contest in Virginia, a race in which Ralph Northam, a
low-wattage Democratic lieutenant governor and neurologist from the
Eastern Shore, is running against Ed Gillespie, a prominent lobbyist and
former chairman of the Republican National Committee. Neither candidate
is a good match for populist themes—they both might have been concocted
in labs run by their parties’ respective establishments—but the news of
the race has been the sharp turn that Gillespie has taken over the past
month, from a moderate candidate focussed primarily on tax cuts and
economic growth to one who champions Trump-style invective.

The President is broadly unpopular in Virginia, and Gillespie has
carefully kept a personal distance from him, avoiding mention of Trump
at rallies and declining to invite him for any joint campaign
appearances. Yet, since September, Gillespie has unleashed a
profoundly ugly campaign on the airwaves. He cut a fearmongering ad
about the Salvadoran gang MS-13. “Their motto is kill, rape, control,”
the narrator intones. Gillespie had previously attacked Northam for
supporting sanctuary cities (even though Virginia has none), but this
latest attack forced the Democrat into a defensive crouch on
immigration—last week, Northam insisted that he would not support
sanctuary cities in Virginia should they develop. (My colleague Jonathan
Blitzer has more on the role that MS-13 has played in this
race.)

Gillespie’s closing messages have all taken up Trumpian themes. In late
October, his campaign released an ad focussed entirely on Confederate
monuments. “I’m for keeping ’em up, and he’s for takin’ ’em down, and
that’s a big difference,” Gillespie said of Northam, in the ad. A
direct-mail campaign featured images of football players kneeling during
the national anthem to protest racial inequality. “You’d never take a
knee,” it read. “So take a stand on Election Day.” These things have
widely been seen as marking a capitulation—Republicans further embracing
racial resentment. Gillespie still trails slightly in the polls, but,
even so, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, was taking a victory lap
this weekend. “The big lesson,” Bannon
told the Times, is that “Trumpism without Trump can show the way forward.”

But how new are these tactics, really? Gillespie, a native of New Jersey
who began his career as a congressional staffer, was an influential
Party insider during George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns. Later,
with Karl Rove, he co-founded the super PAC American Crossroads. Both
Bush campaigns, despite the sunniness of the candidate, relied on
third-party groups pushing dark insinuations—some of them overtly
racial—about his opponents. “Would you be more or less likely to vote
for John McCain . . . if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black
child?” an anonymous push poll asked in the 2000 primaries. The 2004
campaign against John Kerry centered on the outlandish challenge to the
Democratic candidate’s war record sponsored by the group Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth, a main funder of which, Harold Simmons, would later
become a major supporter of American Crossroads. (Bush’s first race for
governor of Texas, in 1994, had been marked by an extensive pattern of
sotto-voce whispering, in conservative East Texas, that his opponent,
the Democrat Ann Richards, was a lesbian.) Trump made explicit what Bush
never had to—the tinged nastiness that his operatives were skilled at
breathing, anonymously, into the political air. But Gillespie did not
need Steve Bannon to show him how to run a campaign built on white
identity resentments. He already had Karl Rove.

On the other side is Northam, a white physician in his late fifties from
rural Virginia who voted for George W. Bush twice. If there was a
specific rationale for having Northam be the Democratic nominee, it was
that he might appeal to voters from the small towns that had once been
contested electoral territory but that went overwhelmingly for Trump
last year. One Northam ad featured the candidate working lovingly to
maintain a 1953 Oldsmobile while insisting that he would not forget rural
Virginia. Northam looked like a strong favorite over the summer, but in
October, as the Gillespie campaign grew darker and he drew closer in the
polls, Democrats began to worry that Northam’s candidacy was repeating
the mismatch of the Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign, in which a
serene white moderate failed to motivate an increasingly progressive and
diverse party base.

It was in this climate that a group called the Latino Victory Fund,
aiming to boost turnout among Virginians of color, released, last
Monday, a horrifying, minute-long online
ad,
which features a white man driving a pickup truck (Gillespie bumper
sticker on the back, Confederate flag flying) and trying to run down
four minority children who are sprinting away from him. “Sickening,”
Gillespie called the ad—and he wasn’t wrong. (A more effective, and less
noxious, ad might have simply stuck to news footage: the images from
Charlottesville, and the stories of terror and uncertainty that the
Trump campaign has unleashed against immigrants, are bad enough.) After
the terrorist attack in lower Manhattan last week, during which
innocents were run down by a truck, the Latino Victory Fund removed the
ad from its Web site. The video has given Republicans something to talk
about in the campaign’s closing days. It has also escalated the panic
among Democrats that the pattern of Clinton’s campaign might be
repeating itself.

The race in Virginia has been a study in a specific form of political
anxiety. From a certain perspective—that of the polling aggregators—the
contest has been relatively stable: in the past decade, Democrats have
tended to win the big races in Virginia by small margins. The last polls
have the race exactly there—Northam is ahead by three
points,
according to the Times; by
five,
according to Fox News; and by two, according to Monmouth
University.
But the surprise of Election Day, 2016, has left behind a vapor of
uncertainty—perhaps (if you are technical) the electorate will be whiter
and older than pollsters have assumed, or perhaps (if you are less so)
Trump has unearthed grievances in the electorate that do not express
themselves except in the anonymity of the voting booth. This
uncertainty over what lies beneath our politics has been the governing
emotion in Virginia this year, and in this race it has led Gillespie to
make explicit ideas that he surely would have preferred remain subtext,
and prompted allies of Northam to cut a panicked ad when their candidate
was probably winning. Plenty of tangible things are at stake in the
Virginia election: whether Virginia’s Medicaid rolls will be slashed,
which party will control the redistricting process after the 2020
census. But there is the intangible one, still unresolved, of whether
Trump and Bannon uncovered something new and lasting in American
politics, or whether politicians in both parties have been spooked by a
ghost.