WASHINGTON — A Republican candidate who embraced Donald Trump’s combative campaign style tested the president’s political clout against the Democratic front-runner in Virginia’s race for governor on Tuesday, the main event in a series of U.S state and local races.
The elections across the country offered a preview of possible battles in next year’s midterm congressional contests, which will determine which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S Senate.
Virginia Republican Ed Gillespie has kept his distance from the president but emulated Trump’s style in his gubernatorial campaign. The Washington lobbyist and former Republican National Committee chairman used hard-edged ads to hit his Democratic rival, Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam, on divisive issues such as immigration, gang crime and Confederate statues.
The most recent statewide opinion polls give the Democrat a slight edge over Gillespie, but the ads have put Northam on the defensive narrowed his lead in recent weeks.
“The momentum is clearly on our side,” Gillespie told Fox News on Monday.
Elsewhere, New Jersey voters were picking a new governor to succeed Republican Chris Christie. Several big cities were selecting mayors, and conservative Utah was holding a special election to replace Republican U.S. Representative Jason Chaffetz, who stepped down before his term ended.
Northam and Gillespie were vying to replace popular Governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat. The former Democratic National Committee chairman staunchly supported his party’s presidential candidate last year, Hillary Clinton, and helped her win Virginia by 5 percentage points.
Despite liberal enthusiasm for resisting Trump and a groundswell of grassroots activism, Democrats lost four congressional special elections this year.
The party is worried about adding a Gillespie win to its list of setbacks, and about Republicans seizing on a victory to exploit similar divisive cultural issues across the country next year, when all 435 seats in the House and 33 of the Senate’s 100 seats come up for election. Republicans now control both chambers.
[ Everything you need to know to vote in Maine on Nov. 7]
Residents of Democratic-leaning Arlington County — Virginia’s most populous county, bordering Washington, D.C. — expressed support and skepticism about Northam and Gillespie as they cast their ballots on Tuesday.
“Trump talks about draining the swamp, but Gillespie kind of is the swamp,” said Nick Peacemaker, who works in marketing and considered himself a Republican until Trump won the party’s presidential nomination.
Peacemaker said Gillespie seemed to shift closer to Trump’s policies after securing the Republican gubernatorial nomination.
Retired librarian Diane Morton took a broad view of her state’s election after voting.
“I am highly opposed to Donald Trump,” she said. “I am appalled by what is happening in our country right now.”
Lee Hernandez, who works in finance, voted for Gillespie because he found the Republican’s economic message more persuasive.
Hernandez, a swing voter who also lives in Arlington, said Northam made his campaign about “keeping Virginia blue (Democratic) or making it blue, and that really was a big turnoff.”
Reviewing the campaign, Democratic strategist Dane Strother said, “Gillespie’s ads played on every fear and dark impulse, and if we lose, we are going to see a lot more of that.”
Gillespie says his policies and plans to bolster Virginia’s economy helped narrow the polling gap.
Twitter salvos
Trump, who endorsed Gillespie but never campaigned for him, on Monday wrote on Twitter the state’s economy under McAuliffe “has been terrible.”
“If you vote Ed Gillespie tomorrow, it will come roaring back!” he wrote.
In response, Northam tweeted voting for him was “the best way to refute Trump’s lies.”
Virginia’s unemployment rate was 3.7 percent in September, better than all but 13 states and below the national rate of just over 4 percent.
Gillespie’s campaign has blasted an ad aired by an outside pro-Northam group — quickly taken down — that depicted a white man chasing down minority children in a pickup truck with a Confederate flag and a Gillespie sticker.
In the governor’s race in Democratic-leaning New Jersey, Democrat Phil Murphy, a former investment banker and ambassador to Germany, has a comfortable lead in polls over Republican Kim Guadagno, the state’s lieutenant governor who has been hampered by her association with the unpopular Christie.
In local races, Democratic Mayors Bill de Blasio in New York and Marty Walsh in Boston are expected to cruise to re-election, while voters will pick mayors in Detroit, Atlanta, Seattle and Charlotte, North Carolina.
In Utah, Republican John Curtis, a strong Trump supporter, is a heavy favorite to fill the congressional seat left vacant by Chaffetz.
Follow the Bangor Daily News on Facebook for the latest Maine news.