Gillespie’s website was quietly updated around New Year’s to remove a video clip of him promoting comprehensive immigration reform and to take off a link to a story that featured him expressing openness to a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, which many on the right view as amnesty.

Both of the already declared Republican Senate candidates expressed confidence Monday that Gillespie can be stopped in such a setting.

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“Money can’t buy you love at the convention because it’s made up of grass-roots conservatives,” said Howie Lind, a retired Naval official and district GOP chairman.

Shak Hill, an Allstate agent who does financial planning, said activists he talks with worry that Gillespie’s record will make the election about him — not Warner’s votes.

“I told this to Ed himself: what I’m hearing from those that I’m speaking with is, they are concerned with the Bush-Rove-Romney connection,” said Hill, a decorated combat pilot who has taken in 46 foster children.

Gillespie is almost certain to beat both men. The risk is that he’ll veer far to the right to silence his intraparty critics, hurting him in the general election.

He’s a pioneer of modern lobbying

The opposition research binders will be thick, and general election ads write themselves.

Gillespie co-founded the bipartisan lobbying firm Quinn Gillespie & Associates in 2000. Enron, the energy company that collapsed in scandal, was among his clients.

He has not been a registered lobbyist since entering the Bush administration in 2007, but he continues to have corporate clients at his private firm. The Democratic Party of Virginia has been pressing for him to disclose his current clients and who paid him speaking fees in recent years.

One lobbying client that Gillespie will likely face fire over is a coalition, funded by insurance companies, that suggested in 2007 the possibility of an individual health care mandate as part of a broader health care solution. Gillespie is adamant that he never personally supported such a mandate and notes that he has consistently opposed Obamacare.

Republican allies of Gillespie respond that the new governor, McAuliffe, also founded a lobbying firm and prevailed in November despite that firm’s work for tobacco companies, the lead industry and companies that wanted to dump waste.

Is he in it to win it?

Conventional wisdom in Old Dominion political circles is that Gillespie is running for Senate now to position himself to run for governor in 2017. McAuliffe, like all governors, is limited to one term. And there is no clear Republican heir apparent after Ken Cuccinelli’s defeat last year.

There’s precedent for this: Mark Warner ran against popular Sen. John Warner in 1996 and his respectable showing helped make him a natural front-runner for governor in 2001. In this scenario, Gillespie would take the brunt of the lobbying attacks this year so that they are old news by 2017.

The problem with this, if it’s actually what he’s planning, is that donors are less inclined to spend large sums of money for him if they think he can’t beat Warner. While the candidate might have deep ties with the constellation of Republican super PACs in Washington, those groups are going to focus their spending on the most winnable races for Republicans.

Warner already has a war chest of $7.1 million cash, so Gillespie will be playing catch-up for months. And the senator has plenty of money of his own to put into the race if he chooses to. A report last week from the Center for Responsive Politics identified Warner as the second-richest member of Congress, with an average net worth of $257 million.