Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, gives remarks at his election night party in Springfield, Va., on Tuesday. (Kate Patterson/For The Washington Post)
The polls, pundits and party bigwigs agreed: Mark R. Warner, the most popular politician in recent Virginia history, was likely to coast to a second term in the Senate. But what the pros missed was a remarkable late surge for Republican Ed Gillespie — a clear statement of voter unhappiness with President Obama, a sharp warning that Warner’s popularity in Richmond doesn’t translate to support for his work in Washington, and a rebuke to GOP strategists who thought Virginia was turning into a reliably Democratic state.
Gillespie, a longtime political operative with no experience as a candidate, was running just barely behind the former governor and one-term senator from Alexandria late Tuesday, after a campaign that sought to capitalize on voter frustration with Washington, the president, and a string of foreign and domestic crises that the government seemed hard-pressed to handle.
The unexpectedly tight race reflects a “reaction to Obamacare and the mood of the country,” said Shaun Kenney, executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia. “The campaign plan all along was to make sure Gillespie caught the wave. We didn’t know how big that wave was going to be, but the hope was that Ed would be on top of it.”
Gillespie seized that wave with a campaign slogan arguing that “Washington changed Mark Warner,” a message that echoed the national effort by Republicans to run against Obama and Democratic leadership in the Senate.
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) called his colleague Tuesday evening and commiserated with him. “We both were shocked at what we were seeing,” Manchin said. “I told my buddy, ‘I can’t believe it.’ But it was real. There is a backlash happening and Mark got swept into it and nobody saw that coming. He’s one of the guys that brings people together. But his opponent ran against us, he ran against Washington, and it caught on.”
After Obama won Virginia twice, and Warner and Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (D) took the state’s two Senate seats, Virginia appeared to be on a demographic march toward Democratic dominance. Democrats and some Republicans concluded that the influx of immigrants, highly educated tech workers and people from the Northeast into the state seemed to portend a more liberal majority, led by surging growth in Northern Virginia.
Warner also had long cultivated traditionally conservative white voters in the state’s rural south.
But some state Republicans saw hope in the narrow margin by which former attorney general Ken Cuccinelli II lost the governorship to Terry McAuliffe last year — 48 percent to 45 percent. That base, plus Obama’s unpopularity, accompanied by doubt about Warner’s ability to translate his bipartisan approach to a deeply polarized U.S. Senate, could translate into a surprise Republican win, Gillespie’s team believed.
“We saw the same thing happen last year,” said Chris LaCivita, the Richmond-based GOP strategist who advised Cuccinelli. Cuccinelli “was grossly outspent, and he had to cut TV ad buys. People seem to forget that midterm elections in Virginia are always more favorable to Republicans. . . . I don’t know how many elections we’re going to have to continue to lose by narrow margins before people understand that fact.”
Gillespie’s best move was to cut into Warner’s base of moderate supporters, LaCivita said: “He got to those people who started to think Warner has become what he had always said he wasn’t: a classic Washington pol who said one thing in D.C. and another thing at home.”
Former GOP governor James S. Gilmore III credited Gillespie with recognizing the deep frustration with political paralysis in Washington. “Mark Warner’s whole theme was ‘I’m a nice guy,’ ” Gilmore said. “Gillespie simply saw the frustration out there about the economy . . ., tied it effectively to Warner and rode that message all the way until Election Day.”
The advance ripples of that wave were subtle enough that they eluded the national Republican Party, which provided little support for the Gillespie campaign. With polls as late as the third week in September showing Warner with a 20-point lead over his challenger, the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s independent spending arm stayed out of the Virginia race. Gillespie was forced to pull most of his TV ads off the air two weeks ago.
In the middle of October, Warner had $8 million in his campaign accounts; Gillespie had but $2 million. To make ends meet, Gillespie lent his own campaign $65,000 in September.
Some Republicans think a golden opportunity was missed.
“You’ll have to ask them why they missed this one,” said former governor and senator George Allen (R). “They went with conventional wisdom.”
Top GOP strategists defended their strategy in Virginia late Tuesday, saying the NRSC spent $675,000 in the state, including $100,000 in the final weekend.
Still, many senior Republicans complained that Gillespie got short shrift from his own party. “He wasn’t on the party’s radar,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.). “He wasn’t a top target. . . . Now, I don’t want to point fingers and get into whom to blame for not coming to his aid earlier. But no question, it’s a surprise.”
Gillespie’s strategists said they don’t blame the national GOP for sending its resources elsewhere, rather than into a race that few expected to be competitive.
“National party’s got a job to do — to take back the Senate,” Kenney said. “A lot of folks in the room will be happy if they can be a part of that.”
Rather than risk a direct assault on a man who took pride in being the state’s most popular governor in recent decades, Gillespie, like many GOP candidates nationwide, ran as much against Obama as against his actual opponent.
“Enough of the electorate was mad at Obama and took it out on the Democratic candidates,” said Andrew Margrave, a Fairfax City piano technician who attended Gillespie’s election night party in Springfield.
Warner’s reputation for bipartisanship during his time in Richmond did not do him much good, Margrave said: “Warner’s days in the governor’s mansion are ancient history. It’s not a factor at all.”
Gillespie chose not so much to bash Warner but rather to express disappointment in him.
“Mark Warner hasn’t been the senator he promised us he would be,” Gillespie’s ads said. “He said he would be an independent voice in the United States Senate, yet voted with President Obama 97 percent of the time.”
Warner, perhaps confident of victory, didn’t emphasize the idea that his challenger was the consummate Washington insider until late in the campaign.
Only in October did Warner focus more on his opponent, releasing a TV spot calling Gillespie “a D.C. lobbyist who made millions lobbying for oil companies and Enron, who specialized in dirty tricks as a partisan operative.”
As governor, Warner “did okay,” said Tom Pengidore, 52, of Alexandria, a Gillespie supporter who works in the software industry. But as Pengidore’s wife, Amy, put it, “I think there was a real and probably honest perception that he was a good governor and served moderately, and he hasn’t translated that to the Senate.”
robert.costa@washpost.com
laura.vozella@washpost.com
Jenna Portnoy and John Woodrow Cox contributed to this report.
