The motto of the gang MS-13—“Kill, Rape, Control”—pulsates on the screen, before cutting to a graffiti portrait of Ralph Northam, the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia. Then a warning: Northam cast a “deciding vote” in favor of sanctuary cities, ushering in a wave of MS-13 terror in Virginia. A separate ad features heavily tattooed Latino men who are meant to represent MS-13 gang members. If you believe the ads, Northam would empty the state’s prisons and open the country’s borders to let foreign felons wreak havoc in Falls Church and MacLean. The ads provoked comparisons to the infamous Willie Horton ad, which arguably helped George H. W. Bush defeat Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election.

Those tattooed men were, in fact, prisoners in El Salvador. Similarly, there are no sanctuary cities in Virginia. This rhetoric would be shocking coming from any candidate, even in 2017. But the ads are particularly notable because they support Ed Gillespie, a former chair of the Republican National Committee who is synonymous with the Republican establishment of the last 30 years. Gillespie—well-monied, well-connected, and very powerful—represents the exact establishment that Donald Trump ran against in 2016. And now he’s the Republican nominee for governor in Virginia, running a campaign with distinct Trumpian themes.

Gillespie was a reluctant convert to Trumpism. In 2014, he narrowly lost a Senate race while running a pro-immigration, pro-growth campaign, along the lines of the autopsy report that Republicans produced after Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012. In the 2017 primary, he came across as a man out of time: He avoided cultural and social issues, emphasized a large, across-the-board tax cut, and produced ads in both Spanish and Korean. But he also nearly lost to Corey Stewart, a local firebrand who was too radical even for the Trump campaign and ran primarily on protecting Confederate monuments in the state. Gillespie’s narrow victory over Stewart means he now faces an unenviable task for any politician: He must win both Virginia’s suburban moms and its unemployed coal miners.



To accomplish this, he’s grafted Trumpism onto bog-standard Republicanism. In a debate with Northam on September 19, he stuck to his main arguments about fiscal responsibility and the need for tax cuts. At the same time, his campaign has quietly pushed ads and flyers emphasizing immigration and Confederate monuments. This two-pronged strategy may not deliver the victory he seeks, but it does represent what is becoming a new normal in Republican politics. As Election Day approaches, Gillespie’s campaign has largely abandoned the tax cut that was once the centerpiece of his platform, pivoting to a strategy of fearmongering and stoking cultural divisions. In this environment, abandoning the Graham-Cassidy health care reform bill, which Gillespie reluctantly did (before sheepishly walking back his opposition), is considered acceptable. But backing away from hardline immigration policies or the debate over Confederate monuments is not.

With less than 40 days before the election, Gillespie is trailing Northam by a consistent but not insurmountable margin: four to six points. Virginia is an increasingly blue state that Hillary Clinton won handily in 2016. Trump’s approval rating is underwater—hovering around 35 percent—and Virginia has historically elected a governor representing the opposite party of the president in its off-year elections. Gillespie has to find a way to appeal to northern suburban voters, while holding on to the GOP base.

