Ever since Donald Trump’s unexpected election as president last November, not just the pundit class but plenty of Americans across the ideological spectrum have come to fear that the Republican businessman’s triumph wasn’t a one-off event triggered by economic and cultural anxieties and a weak Democratic opponent. Increasingly, Trump’s successful scorched-Earth campaign seems to be a sign America is a meaner, darker place than many people thought. After the fall of Harvey Weinstein, it’s incongruous to think back to Trump’s relentless belittling of his women accusers as “horrible,” “sick” and “phony” — and that was just one example of Trump’s contempt for the norms of civic discourse.

This fear of a mean-spirited America is stoked by every transgressive presidential act, such as when Trump got into a spat with the newly widowed wife of an American soldier. But there has also been reason for optimism. For months, elected Republicans have largely steered clear of the Trump playbook of inflammatory comments, personal attacks on critics and constant media-bashing. While they may share the president’s aggressive, divisive views on immigration, they still seem to grasp that civility and decorum matter. This has generally seemed to be true for most elected Democrats as well.

Until the Virginia governor’s race, which concludes with voting Tuesday. Once a conservative redoubt, Virginia has become steadily more Democratic in recent years. Both its senators are Democrats, as is termed-out governor Terry McAuliffe, and its voters have backed Democrats in three straight presidential elections.

To break this losing streak, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie — previously a mainstream, moderate, “big tent” Republican National Committee chairman and aide to President George W. Bush — is running a campaign built on hot-button Trump-like takes on culturally freighted issues. One of his ads assert that his Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, is “fighting for the violent MS-13 killer gangs” because of his tie-breaking vote in the state Senate to allow cities to reassure unauthorized immigrants they will not be targeted by law enforcement. Another ad blasts Northam for supporting McAuliffe’s program to restore voting rights to criminals — considered a civil rights issue by African-Americans in Virginia — after their release from prison.


But a Democratic group has an anti-Gillespie ad that is at least as toxic as anything the Republican has released. The Latino Victory Fund put out an ad in which minority youths are being chased by a pickup truck that is flying the Confederate battle flag and has a Gillespie bumper sticker.

Daily Beast columnist Matt Lewis made the case last week that there was nothing unusual or even Trump-inspired about the Virginia governor’s race, saying previous governor’s races often dealt with culturally sensitive issues.

Maybe. But from a distance, this benign assessment seems hard to swallow. This is a governor’s race in which white voters are told they risk death at the hands of nonwhites, and nonwhite voters are told they risk death at the hands of whites — and both sides defend their tactics.

When politicians shove certain people out of their tents instead of seeking new supporters, that portends an ugly future. If this is the new normal for American politics, we will be a diminished nation.


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