On Tuesday night, voters in two states seemingly rejected the political vision so far proffered by Donald Trump and the G.O.P., electing Democrats by wide margins to the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia. While the Democratic win in New Jersey was largely predictable—the Republican candidate was, after all, Chris Christie’s lieutenant governor—Ralph Northam’s decisive win in Virginia, along with the sheer number of Virginia House seats that fell to Democrats, stunned conservatives who believed a populist revolution was afoot. Rather than grappling with the apparent rejection of Trumpism, however, the right wing almost immediately developed an alternative explanation for Ed Gillespie’s loss: he was not Trump enough.

While Trump tweeted that Gillespie had lost because he “did not embrace me or what I stand for,” would-be populist kingmaker Steve Bannon was privately “fuming.” According to the Daily Beast, Bannon had pulled out all the stops for Gillespie, offering to stump on his behalf, inviting him onto his Breitbart radio show, and proposing an interview with his Web site. But Gillespie, a Bush administration official-turned-lobbyist, rebuffed every offer.

Bannon’s allies used Gillespie’s refusals as evidence that the former R.N.C. chairman had not been sufficiently populist-nationalist—or, as Bannon reportedly complained behind the scenes, would not go “full Trump.” “Ed Gillespie had no message, was inauthentic, spoke from both sides of his mouth, and at the end of the day, even the deplorables couldn’t save him,” Andrew Surabian, Bannon’s political adviser and director of the Great America PAC, told the Beast. Ultimately, Surabian suggested that Gillespie’s biggest flaw was that he “campaigned with George W. Bush, [but] ran from President Trump.”

Bannon’s news outlet echoed his complaints, labeling Gillespie a “Republican swamp thing” on its front page and publishing an article calling his embrace of Trumpism insincere. Gillespie, Breitbart writer Tony Lee pointed out, tried to embrace culture-war language, attacking Latino gangs like MS-13 and railing against “sanctuary cities” (which do not exist in Virginia). “Gillespie and his band of virtue-signaling Bush loyalists in the G.O.P. love when political and media elites pat them on their heads for being ‘good Republicans’ (translation: useful idiots),” Lee wrote. “But when Gillespie was down double digits in the polls, he suddenly decided that the way to win was to focus on illegal immigration.”

On Fox News, the tone was less vindictive—if only because the outlet barely acknowledged the Democratic victories, period. Of the three primetime hosts on air Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson mentioned the election at the end of his show, Sean Hannity brought the losses up once and dismissed them as “not states Trump won,” and Laura Ingraham, an ardent Trump supporter, pinned the blame on Gillespie himself. Northam, she said, had beaten the “old Bush hand,” performing better than Hillary Clinton did in Virginia in 2016. “But what does that tell you? That tells you a populist conservative like [Donald] Trump, who has a strong personality and strong message, did do better,” she said. “He didn’t spend a lot of time campaigning in Virginia . . . and Ed Gillespie tried to do this dance that ‘I’m not going to campaign with Trump, but he’ll tweet for me and do a last-minute robocall.’”

“I think in the end that came off as desperate,” she added.