Republicans seek new path after failure of Gillespie's 'Trumpism without Trump'

By Michael Scherer and David Weigel November 7 at 10:58 PM

The Republican Party thought it had a plan to win the governor’s mansion in Virginia: Run a mainstream candidate who could nonetheless employ the racially charged culture-war rhetoric of President Trump to turn out a white working-class base.

A onetime establishment stalwart, Ed Gillespie, declined to campaign with Trump — but he executed the plan as well as he could. He defended Confederate memorials, vilified Central American gangs in ads that looked like horror movies and even denounced the kneeling protests of professional football players.

Then the voters voted, and Republicans went down in defeat across the state, from the top of the ticket to the bottom. A Democratic transgender candidate unseated a conservative in Prince William County. The Republican whip in the House of Delegates lost to a self-identified democratic socialist. And Republicans found themselves shut out of the top statewide offices, again.

The result is a bad omen for the Republican Party nationally, who will face head winds across the country in 2018, given continued frustration with political leaders in Washington and Trump’s low approval rating. Without faith that Trump’s base will match the enthusiasm of Democrats, many Republican candidates believe they will have to seek out a new political strategy to hold onto power.

“This is just an old-fashioned thumping,” former Virginia GOP congressman Tom Davis said as the results came in. Urban voters, he said, came out in droves to send the Republican Party a message. “They have taken all of these guys out,” Davis said of the state’s denser districts. “The party is going to have to get right on immigration if they want to win in these areas.”

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/republicans-seek-new-path-after-failure-of-gillespies-trumpism-without-trump/2017/11/07/3afb9144-c3e7-11e7-aae0-cb18a8c29c65_story.html