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In his first major interview since losing Virginia’s governor’s race, Republican Ed Gillespie said he’s “done with running for public office” and wouldn’t encourage anyone he cares about to enter the “poisonous atmosphere” of electoral politics.

Gillespie didn’t explicitly blame President Donald Trump for his loss in a wide-ranging interview this week with David Axelrod, the former adviser to President Barack Obama who is now the director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. But Gillespie, a member of the institute’s board, who narrowly lost a 2014 run against U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va., said Trump was a “big factor” in the turnout surge that carried Democrats to wide victories in all three statewide races and major gains in the House of Delegates.

“The atmosphere is definitely different in ’17 than it was in ’14. There’s no two ways about it. It is a much more poisonous atmosphere,” Gillespie said in the episode of Axelrod’s “The Axe Files” interview series. “I don’t know if there’s causality or correlation. I’ll leave that for others to determine. But I could not honestly say to someone that I like and think is a halfway decent human being, ‘Yeah, you ought to run for office.’”