The primary pits Stewart and another Republican candidate against Ed Gillespie, a former RNC chairman and partner in one of DC’s biggest lobbying firms—you might call him the personification of the Beltway “swamp” Trump has vowed to drain. Stewart, a county board chairman in the exurban Prince William County, has three major themes: his embrace of Trump; his decade-long crackdown on illegal immigration; and his opposition to the removal of Confederate monuments, which has made him an ally of white supremacists and the alt-right.

In Fredericksburg, where the Confederate army led by Robert E. Lee won a bloody Civil War battle in 1862, Stewart got hearty cheers for his opposition to “this politically correct madness of sanitizing history.” He described it as a leftist crusade that would not stop until it had deleted the Founding Fathers themselves from the national memory.

It has been seven months since Trump shocked the world by winning the presidency, and American politics remains unsettled and contested terrain in the wake of his victory. The jury is still out on what it meant—did Trump fundamentally scramble the old alignments and render the old way of doing politics obsolete? Or was his triumph a one-off, a fluke, an exception? No one is more invested in puzzling out the answers than politicians, whose careers depend on their ability to adapt to this strange new environment.

Virginia, one of two states to hold odd-year elections, will shed some of the first light on those questions. Trump has exerted a gravitational pull on both sides of the race. The close and hotly contested Democratic primary is being watched as a proxy for the battle for the soul of the modern left, with a progressive former congressman, Tom Perriello, mounting an insurgent challenge to the establishment-backed lieutenant governor, Ralph Northam.

On the Republican side, Gillespie is seen as the overwhelming front-runner. A Washington Post poll last month put him 20 points ahead of Stewart, 38 percent to 18 percent, with a third candidate pulling 15 percent and a quarter of likely primary voters still undecided. To Stewart, nominating Gillespie would be a disaster for the GOP, which last won the governorship in 2009.

“It is a losing strategy,” he told me. “It’s the party going back to business as usual. And it’s so boring! These establishment candidates, they’ve been saying the same things since the 1980s.” Trump, he said, gave the party a new road map for winning white working-class voters. “If we go back to nominating hoity-toity, non-controversial establishment candidates like Ed, we lose all those people.”

I had many interesting conversations about the Civil War with the attendees at Stewart’s event, most of them older white people, many of them transplants from other states who had worked for federal or local government. Stewart himself is originally from Minnesota, a fact that has earned him quite a bit ridicule, particularly when he tweeted, in April, “Nothing is worse than a Yankee telling a Southerner that his monuments don't matter.”