And so last week we saw the Republican nominee for governor, Ed Gillespie, releasing a campaign video that called for legalizing fireworks in Virginia.

In a campaign ad posted online, Gillespie called Virginia’s fireworks “rinky dink,” noting that the state was missing out on job creation and tax revenue. He promised to let Virginians “have some fun” by making more serious fireworks legal.

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With Virginia’s election essentially becoming nationalized, and with the country talking about health care and immigration, why focus on such a, well, rinky-dink issue?

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The ad is a telling one, particularly because it is the first major policy effort from the Gillespie campaign after their candidate’s narrower-than-expected win in the Republican primary. Heavily favored over Corey A. Stewart, a little-known Prince William County official, Gillespie, a longtime political consultant, won by only a few thousand votes. Finding that his strongly anti-immigration stance seemingly wasn’t enough to rally conservatives, Stewart decided to go full-on Confederate. He waged a twitter campaign on behalf of Confederate monuments, defended the Confederate battle flag and even showed up to Danville’s Old South Ball engaging in, at least some thought, Confederate cosplay.

Stewart was dismissed by many observers as a joke. And yet he almost toppled the long-time front-runner Gillespie, turning out red-blooded conservatives who felt they were ignored by the party establishment. Sound familiar? It should, considering Stewart himself noted that “I was Trump before Trump was Trump.”

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So while Gillespie prevailed, he finds himself facing a divided party: He’s beloved by the Virginia Republican establishment, who see him as the tested conservative candidate who would have defeated Sen. Mark Warner in 2014 with more national party support. But he’s mistrusted by the conservative party base, who much prefer the red-meat politics of Corey Stewart and Donald Trump.

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Gillespie’s dilemma, of course, is one that many Republicans are likely to face in the 2018 national elections: Trump is still embraced by their base, but is immensely (bigly?) unpopular with the rest of humanity. The president’s approval ratings are at historic lows, and the Republican Party’s chief policy goal of the year, health-care reform, is almost as unpopular.

And this is the story of this Virginia gubernatorial campaign. Gillespie’s real opponent is not the Democratic nominee, Lt. Governor Ralph Northam, but the Twitter troll occupying the White House. How much should, or even can, Gillespie embrace an unpopular national figure? How can he reach out to moderate voters without alienating his base?

This fireworks gambit appears to be the Gillespie campaign’s first try at an answer.