Trump weighed in for Gillespie in a series of tweets and with automated Election Day phone calls encouraging turnout.
Donald J. Trump
✔ @realDonaldTrump
.@EdWGillespie will totally turn around the high crime and poor economic performance of VA. MS-13 and crime will be gone. Vote today, ASAP!
This was not a wise tweet.
It’s not only Trump who was proved to be disloyal Tuesday night. Stephen K. Bannon told The Washington Post this week: “t was the Trump-Stewart talking points that got Gillespie close and even maybe to victory. It was embracing Trump’s agenda as personified by Corey’s platform. This was not a competitive race four weeks ago. You could have stuck a fork in Gillespie.”
Four weeks ago, Gillespie trailed by about six points in the RealClearPolitics average. He lost by more than that. And after he lost, Bannon’s Breitbart, the site he manages, declared in a main headline that Gillespie was a “Republican swamp thing” who, it was implied, deserved to lose.
Bannon’s track record in electoral politics? He helped Trump lose the popular vote and win the electoral college in 2016. He embraced Luther Strange’s opponent after Strange was trailing. And now he watched the “Trump-Stewart talking points” lead nowhere.
On its home page, Breitbart also championed Trump’s argument that Gillespie should have embraced him more robustly. That’s a flawed theory. Trump is very unpopular in Virginia, and Northam won among those who disapprove of Trump by a 7-to-1 margin, according to preliminary exit polls. A third of voters said their vote in the race was meant to send a message of opposition to Trump — twice as many as said it was a message of support.
What’s more, Trump made his feelings clear. Those who wanted to vote for Trump’s candidate knew who that candidate was. As in Alabama, voters went in another direction.
It’s unlikely that many Republicans worried about next November will be convinced by Trump’s argument. Instead, they’re likely to take another lesson: Trump can’t deliver a victory for you when you’re trailing, and neither can Trumpism. (In fact, there’s every reason to think that Trump was the liability that his poll numbers would suggest, with Gillespie doing fine in western Virginia but getting beaten badly in more-Democratic Northern Virginia.) Nor will Trump stand with you should things go south.
If, next summer, the question of Trump’s fate as president is raised, how might Republicans in center-right districts be expected to evaluate that decision?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...or-himself/?tid=pm_pop&utm_term=.c06c5f4d8de9
✔ @realDonaldTrump
.@EdWGillespie will totally turn around the high crime and poor economic performance of VA. MS-13 and crime will be gone. Vote today, ASAP!
This was not a wise tweet.
It’s not only Trump who was proved to be disloyal Tuesday night. Stephen K. Bannon told The Washington Post this week: “t was the Trump-Stewart talking points that got Gillespie close and even maybe to victory. It was embracing Trump’s agenda as personified by Corey’s platform. This was not a competitive race four weeks ago. You could have stuck a fork in Gillespie.”
Four weeks ago, Gillespie trailed by about six points in the RealClearPolitics average. He lost by more than that. And after he lost, Bannon’s Breitbart, the site he manages, declared in a main headline that Gillespie was a “Republican swamp thing” who, it was implied, deserved to lose.
Bannon’s track record in electoral politics? He helped Trump lose the popular vote and win the electoral college in 2016. He embraced Luther Strange’s opponent after Strange was trailing. And now he watched the “Trump-Stewart talking points” lead nowhere.
On its home page, Breitbart also championed Trump’s argument that Gillespie should have embraced him more robustly. That’s a flawed theory. Trump is very unpopular in Virginia, and Northam won among those who disapprove of Trump by a 7-to-1 margin, according to preliminary exit polls. A third of voters said their vote in the race was meant to send a message of opposition to Trump — twice as many as said it was a message of support.
What’s more, Trump made his feelings clear. Those who wanted to vote for Trump’s candidate knew who that candidate was. As in Alabama, voters went in another direction.
It’s unlikely that many Republicans worried about next November will be convinced by Trump’s argument. Instead, they’re likely to take another lesson: Trump can’t deliver a victory for you when you’re trailing, and neither can Trumpism. (In fact, there’s every reason to think that Trump was the liability that his poll numbers would suggest, with Gillespie doing fine in western Virginia but getting beaten badly in more-Democratic Northern Virginia.) Nor will Trump stand with you should things go south.
If, next summer, the question of Trump’s fate as president is raised, how might Republicans in center-right districts be expected to evaluate that decision?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...or-himself/?tid=pm_pop&utm_term=.c06c5f4d8de9
