Lt. Gov. Ralph S. Northam, an understated physician and Army veteran, was elected governor of Virginia Tuesday,
according to the Associated Press, overcoming a racially charged
campaign by his Republican opponent and cementing Virginia’s
transformation into a reliably Democratic state largely immune to
Trump-style appeals.
Mr.
Northam was propelled to victory over Ed Gillespie, the Republican
nominee, by liberal and moderate voters who were eager to send a message
to President Trump in a state that rejected him in 2016 and where he is
deeply unpopular.
The
campaign between a pair of low-key, establishment politicians was
brought to life by national wedge issues, from immigration to
Confederate iconography, and Mr. Northam’s win offered a momentary
catharsis for Democrats beyond Virginia’s borders, who have been hungry
to find political success this year.
Democrats
are likely to fare well overall on Tuesday night if they wrest the
governorship of New Jersey away from Republican control, and perhaps
capture a key legislative chamber in Washington State, which would give
the party full control of government on the West Coast. In New Jersey,
Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive, held a wide polling lead
before Election Day.
And
Mr. Northam’s victory also handed Democrats a stronger hand to block
any Republican attempts at gerrymandering after the next census.
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But
more than that, his victory was a tonic to an anxious national party
that has been reeling since Mr. Trump’s win last year and demoralized by
losses in special House elections in Montana and Georgia.
A
native of Virginia’s rural Eastern Shore who bears a Tidewater accent
that reveals his rural roots, Mr. Northam, 58, was a perhaps an unlikely
vessel for the resistance-era Democratic Party. But the left overlooked
the two votes he cast for George W. Bush before he entered politics and
his otherwise sterling resume — he is a pediatric neurologist and Gulf
War veteran — proved far more appealing to the state’s broad middle than
Mr. Gillespie’s background as a corporate lobbyist.
The
Democrats’ success here was all the more sweet to them because it came
as Mr. Gillespie, trailing in the polls, turned to a scorched-earth
campaign against Mr. Northam in the race’s final weeks. Mr. Gillespie, a
fixture of his party’s establishment who had once warned against the
“siren song” of anti-immigrant politics, unleashed a multimillion dollar
onslaught linking his rival to a gang with Central American ties and a
convicted pedophile who had his rights restored, while also assailing
Mr. Northam for wanting to remove Virginia’s Confederate statues.
The
strategy appeared to help Mr. Gillespie narrow the gap in the wake of
the Charlottesville protests, but it was not enough to overcome the
anti-Trump energy in an increasingly diverse state that has not elected a
Republican to statewide office since 2009.
Mr.
Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, found it
difficult to balance appeals to the president’s unflagging supporters in
rural Virginia while simultaneously attempting to win over Mr. Trump’s
skeptics in the state’s population centers. He often would not say the
president’s name, referring instead to “the administration” or last
year’s Republican “ticket.”
Mr.
Northam did not have to concern himself with any such political
contortions running in a state that has backed the Democratic nominee
for president in the last three elections, a striking role reversal from
an earlier day here when Virginia Democrats had to distinguish
themselves from their more liberal national party.
Indeed,
support for Mr. Northam represented a vote for continuity. Gov. Terry
McAuliffe, a Democrat barred by state law from seeking re-election, is
broadly popular, as are the state’s two Democratic senators, Timothy
Kaine and Mark Warner, themselves former governors. Mr. McAuliffe, who
was elected in 2013, was the first person in 40 years to win a Virginia
governor’s race who was in the same party as the president’s.
Given
the state’s steady drift left, Mr. Northam began the race as the
front-runner. And he was not expected to have a primary at all.
Mr. Gillespie, also, was assumed to have a lock on his own party’s nomination.
But
in an illustration of the turbulent politics that is upending both
parties, the two establishment-aligned candidates each faced challenges
in the June primaries from candidates making more ideological appeals.
Mr.
Gillespie only narrowly averted defeat against Corey Stewart, a Prince
William County supervisor and an outspoken Trump backer who oriented his
campaign around defending Confederate monuments in Virginia, where
there are more such monuments than in any other state. While Mr. Stewart
nominally endorsed Mr. Gillespie, he spent much of the general election
taunting his former rival, demanding he more fully embrace Mr. Trump
and trumpeting his hastily announced 2018 Senate bid against Mr. Kaine.
Mr.
Northam easily dispatched his primary opponent, the former congressman
Tom Perriello, but was dogged by liberal grumbling throughout the
general election that he was insufficiently energetic and unwilling to
fully confront Mr. Trump.
After blanketing the state’s airwaves before the primary with an ad in which he savaged the president as “a narcissistic maniac,”
Mr. Northam struck a more sober-minded tone during the general election
with another widely aired commercial in which he vowed to “work with” Mr. Trump when it is in the interest of Virginia.
With two amiable candidates, the race began as a genteel affair in the high-minded, if not always followed, Virginia tradition.
Neither
criticized the other very sharply in a handful of debates and both used
their stump speeches to focus chiefly on bolstering the economy of a
state that is still heavily dependent on the federal government.
But
the tone changed in October when Mr. Gillespie began airing an ad
excoriating Mr. Northam for supporting a state measure in support of
so-called sanctuary cities, which limit cooperation with federal immigration agents. The commercial featured a group of heavily tattooed men who turned out to be prisoners in a Salvadoran jail.
It was followed not long after by a series of ads
focusing on Mr. Northam’s support for the restoration of rights for
felons after they are released from prison; these featured a convicted
child molester.
Democrats
cried foul, but then only seemed to hand Mr. Gillespie a chance to
express his own outrage when, in the last week of the campaign, a
liberal Hispanic advocacy group aired a commercial portraying a man in a truck with a Gillespie sticker trying to drive into a group of children of color.
The group pulled the spot in the aftermath of the deadly truck attack in New York and Mr. Northam distanced himself from it, but it gave Republicans fodder at the 11th hour.
By Election Day, Mr. Trump could not resist weighing in on the race in his typically bombastic fashion.
“Ralph Northam will allow crime to be rampant in Virginia,” the president wrote on Twitter while traveling in South Korea.
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