The national spotlight swung to Virginia Tuesday as voters came out for the country’s first swing-state test of how candidates of both parties will combat, embrace or finesse President Donald Trump’s fierce populism one year after it propelled him into the White House.
Virginians came out on a cold, wet election day having endured an increasingly negative campaign that many said left them exhausted and dismayed. Still, turn out in some of the most populous precincts was running slightly higher than for the last gubernatorial race, according to early reports. Polls will close statewide at 7 p.m.
Trump himself weighed in repeatedly during the day on behalf of GOP nominee Ed Gillespie, a long-time establishment Republican who distanced himself from the president personally while adopting some of his culture war stylings late in the campaign. In television ads, Gillespie slammed Democrat Ralph Northam as soft on crime and the Salvadoran gang MS-13, an attack Trump repeated by Twitter from Asia:
“Ralph Northam will allow crime to be rampant in Virginia,” Trump wrote on Twitter. If the Republican wins, Trump said, “MS-13 and crime will be gone.”
Trump also recorded a robo-call received in some voters’ homes late Monday and into Tuesday. “Northam is weak on crime, weak on immigration, and as your lieutenant governor, Northam has driven your economy right into a ditch, and he didn’t even show up to the most important meetings,” the president, according to a transcript obtained by Politico.
“The voicemail was very Trump,” said Marvin McFeaters, 72, who had just voted for Gillespie in Falls Church. The retired Vietnam War veteran wants to curb illegal immigration, though he is a “big believer in legal immigration” and is married to a naturalized citizen. He had not seen Gillespie ads linked Northam to MS-13 and pedophilia but said the Democrat supports “sanctuary cities” for those in the country illegally and restoring rights to convicted sex offenders.
Voters brought competing outrages to the polls. A backlash against Gillespie ads seemed to have inspired some Democratic voters to turn out for Northam. But many Gillespie supporters said they were likewise offended by a pro-Northam ad from the group Latino Victory Fund that depicted a Gillespie supporter in a truck chasing minority children.
The president “got me here at six in the morning,” said Drew Bendon, 53, of Arlington. The stay-at-home father said he was “disappointed” by Gillespie’s campaign, in particular the MS-13 ads which seemed to equate illegal immigrants with violent criminals.
“Especially after Charlottesville, it’s dangerous to conflate gang activity and the way a person looks,” he said.
[Here’s a rundown of the issues in the governor’s race ]
Yani Portillo, 50, voted in a gubernatorial race for the first time, supporting the Democratic ticket.
“I wanted the Republicans out,” said Portillo, of Springfield. “It’s not right for the country to have this environment where there’s hate, where there’s just a lot of negative one-against-the-other type of thing . . . I thought I should do my part to put my little grain of salt.”
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Margaret Patterson, 29, a lawyer from Arlington, said Gillespie’s campaign convinced her to vote Democratic.
The negative advertising “influenced me to vote, probably in the opposite way it intended me to,” she said.
Patterson’s husband, Hunter Patterson, also 29, was turned off by a negative ad, too: the Latino Victory Fund campaign’s spot against Gillespie.
“I wanted to send a clear message that not all Republicans” are racists, he said.
Michelle Villado, 44, a government contractor from Arlington, said she, too, felt compelled to vote against Northam because he “didn’t speak against” the Latino Victory Fund ad.
“I wasn’t going to come vote,” said Villado, a libertarian who did not vote in 2016, but “I felt the need to vote for the other guy.”
Villado is not Latino, but her ex-husband and his family are. The ad was “inflammatory, putting everyone . . . in this horrendous group who would unconscionably mow over children because of their race,” she said.
[Interested in Virginia’s governor’s race? Join our Facebook group]
Robert Kinsler, 33, a business owner in Alexandria, was also incensed by the Latino Victory Fund ad.
“I thought the ad was very despicable and pushed me over the edge. It played to the common refrain from the left that the right is evil,” Kinsler said as he finished voting at Alexandria Fire Station #204. “It’s just very low.”
Kinsler’s vote for Gillespie was driven in part by his opposition to sanctuary cities.
Barbara Cottman, 73, a retired nurse and Trump supporter, said the same.
“I believe in make America first,” said Cottman, who is African American and lives in Woodbridge. Sanctuary cities, she said, are “spitting in the president’s face.”
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Virginia does not have any sanctuary cities, and Northam has said he opposes them.
Some minority voters, meanwhile, expressed the same fears that the Latino Victory Fund ad invoked.
“We have children, and we want to raise them in a place where they feel safe and secure,” said Ridaa Chippa, who voted in Arlington. She and her husband, Hamaad, who now live in Fairfax, said they worry that anti-Muslim bias could increase if Gillespie wins.
Jose Marquez, 54, voted in Woodbridge with his American-born son, a 23-year-old college student. Marquez, who works in construction and lives in Woodbridge, came to the United States when he was 18, fleeing El Salvador’s brutal civil war. He became a citizen in 1995 and said he has voted ever since.
He said he is deeply concerned about racism in Virginia and discrimination against immigrants. By alienating Latinos and immigrants, he said, the Republican Party is contributing to its own demise.
“It’s breaking them,” he said.
Kamran Atabaki, 69, disagreed. The Falls Church voter and real estate broker, who immigrated from Iran in 1970, said he was “not living in the United States to be a socialist or a communist.”
Atabaki, who campaigned for Trump last year, said he appreciated Gillespie’s commitment to cracking down on gang violence.
“All I want is to punish the bad people and the criminals,” Atabaki said. “I have a six-month old granddaughter, and I want the world to be a better place for her.”
Virginia’s gubernatorial election is typically a low-turnout event. But while rain may keep some home, there are indicators that this matchup is drawing more voters than usual for an off-year contest.
Several poll workers in Northern Virginia said they were seeing heavier morning traffic than they did four years ago.
“We have a lot of early voters,” said Allyn Hammel, the chief election officer at West Springfield High School. “This is busier than I expected it to be.”
At Kerrydale Elementary School in Woodbridge, poll chief David Ogbonlowo said 470 of 3,397 registered voters had cast their ballots by 11 a.m.
“Some elections we never had half of that,” by that hour, he said.
The election has set a record for absentee voting. The more than 147,000 absentee votes cast as of Friday night were the most for a nonpresidential year in Virginia history.
A record amount of money has been spent on the three statewide contests for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general, and both Democrats and Republicans say their volunteers have doubled or tripled the number of home visits, phone calls and text messaging to get voters to turn out, compared with the 2013 governor’s race.
Northam and the Democrats are concentrating on a deep-blue urban crescent that runs from Northern Virginia to Richmond and Hampton Roads and has been key to Democratic wins for statewide offices since 2009.
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Gillespie has been courting Republicans in white rural Southwest and Southside Virginia but also needs to peel away moderates and independents. He particularly needs votes in Northern Virginia, where he lives, to overcome Northam’s built-in advantage with Democrats in the most populous part of the state.
African American voters are an important bloc for Democrats and have been pivotal in their ability to win statewide elections. Northam comes from Hampton Roads, home to a large African American population, and is backed by scores of black elected officials statewide, relationships that he cultivated over 10 years as a state lawmaker and lieutenant governor.
Former president Barack Obama campaigned in Richmond for Northam last month, the most prominent of several high-profile African American Democrats who have stumped for him, including Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.) and Kamala D. Harris (Calif.). Obama also recorded a robo-call on Northam’s behalf.
[African Americans may be key to a Democratic victory]
Still, a misstep earlier this month by the Northam campaign — it omitted Justin Fairfax, the African American Democrat running for lieutenant governor, from some campaign literature funded by a union that endorsed Northam but not Fairfax — sparked criticism that the Democrats were taking the black vote for granted.
In eastern Henrico County, however, where Democrats have targeted African American voters, poll workers said turnout so far was about average.
Angela Canty, 49, said she was not enthusiastic about this year’s candidates but felt motivated to vote in opposition to Trump.
“I just feel like he has cast such a negative on the Republican Party,” said Canty, a health-care worker. “It’s the worst it’s ever been.”
Gillespie, a former lobbyist, chairman of the Republican National Committee and White House counselor to President George W. Bush, nearly beat Sen. Mark R. Warner (D) in 2014, and he emerged from that contest with newfound stature and name recognition. But running for governor this year, Gillespie nearly lost the June GOP primary to Corey A. Stewart, who ran a surprisingly strong campaign in the Trump mold in which he celebrated Confederate statues and called for a crackdown on illegal immigration.
[Gillespie ad tries to tie Northam to MS-13 gang violence]
After the primary, Gillespie struggled for months to strike the right posture toward Trump. He tried to avoid reacting to the daily barrage of Trump controversies, often bypassing the mainstream media in favor of controlled appearances before friendly groups he could later trumpet on social media. He reacted gingerly last month when the president tweeted an endorsement.
But from his initial emphasis on the economy and taxes, Gillespie steered toward cultural issues such as illegal immigration and Confederate statues — a strategy that polling suggests helped him firm up support among conservatives.
[To become Virginia governor in Trump’s America, Gillespie embraces culture wars]
Carol Fox, 67, said she worried Gillespie didn’t do enough.
“He should’ve gone to Corey Stewart, buried the hatchet and got Corey to go out and get the Trump voters,” the Republican activist said before voting in Prince William County.
Libertarian Cliff Hyra is also on the ballot, but he has been registering in the low single digits.
Voters will also choose between Fairfax and Republican state Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel for lieutenant governor, and between Republican John Adams and Democratic incumbent Mark Herring for attorney general.
Besides the statewide races, all 100 seats in the House of Delegates are on the ballot. A record number of Democrats are running, including a record number of women.
Republicans have a 66-34 advantage in the House; Democrats would need to flip 17 seats to win control. They are focusing their efforts on 17 legislative districts represented by Republicans but carried by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton last fall. Still, many of those districts are in exurbs where minorities and millennials vote Democratic in presidential races but historically don’t show up for state races the following year.
Of all the delegate races, the contest that has attracted national attention is in Prince William County, where Democrat Danica Roem, a transgender woman and former journalist, is challenging conservative GOP Del. Bob Marshall, the sponsor of unsuccessful legislation that would require transgender people to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender at birth. Marshall, who refers to Roem as “he,” has refused to debate her. Clinton carried his district by 14 points in 2016.
[Marshall, a culture warrior, fights to defend “the laws of nature” ]
Another race that has received wide attention is in Southwest Virginia between Republican incumbent Joseph Yost and Democrat Chris Hurst, a former news anchor whose girlfriend, reporter Alison Parker, was fatally shot in 2015 on live television.
Polls close at 7 p.m.
steve.hendrix@washpost.com
Rachel Chason, Sarah Gibson, Kristen Griffith, Antonio Olivo, Maria Sacchetti, Gregory S. Schneider, Shira Stein, Laura Vozzella and Julie Zauzmer contributed to this report.