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.