"Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for."

"Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!”

Tweeted Trump, quoted in a WaPo piece with a headline that seems premature, "Republicans seek new path after failure of Gillespie’s ‘Trumpism without Trump.’" That's by Michael Scherer and David Weigel. How do they know what Republicans are seeking based on one Republican losing a race in a blue state? Or is this just another headline that doesn't represent the text of the article?

Scherer and Weigel begin:

The Republican Party thought it had a plan to win the governor’s mansion in Virginia: Run a mainstream candidate who could nonetheless employ the racially charged culture-war rhetoric of President Trump to turn out a white working-class base.

Yikes. Did that happen? Republicans had that as a plan? Sounds more like the Democratic Party's plan to defeat the Republican — get people to believe that's what Ed was doing. I saw the pickup truck ad: Scare people into thinking Republicans are heartless haters.

A onetime establishment stalwart, Ed Gillespie, declined to campaign with Trump — but he executed the plan as well as he could. He defended Confederate memorials, vilified Central American gangs in ads that looked like horror movies and even denounced the kneeling protests of professional football players.

So an old-time GOP guy got dressed up for Election Day as an old-time GOP guy's idea of what Trump is. I didn't follow the race closely enough to know what Gillespie actually did, but I do think that GOP candidates can't be like Trump by adopting a bunch of seemingly Trumpish policy positions.

Compare what Scott Adams wrote in his phenomenal book "Win Bigly/Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter":

[P]ersuasion was more important to the outcome than policies; we just perceive it to be the other way around.... If you think Trump’s policies got him elected, you have to explain why his positions substantially changed during the campaign and he still won. My filter explains it perfectly: Trump is so persuasive that policies didn’t matter. People voted for him even as his policies were murky and changing....

You might have seen a viral video on Jimmy Kimmel Live of street interviews in which a prankster presented Trump’s policy positions as Hillary Clinton’s policies and asked her supporters if they agreed with those positions. Lots of people said they did. I’ll take it one step further by saying Trump would have won the election even if he and Clinton had switched positions and erased our memories of their old opinions. It literally didn’t matter what policies either person brought to the table. People made up their minds based on biases alone. That is typical when you get to the final two candidates, as both of them are capable of doing the job. So we use our biases to break the tie. Later we will imagine that our reasons were totally rational.

Here's the Jimmy Kimmel thing:



ADDED: I didn't follow the Virginia race enough to know what exactly Gillespie did to try to appropriate some idea of what Trump is.

But the idea of copying Trump by acting hardcore towards immigrants is very stupid. I don't think anyone really understands what Trump did, which was at a deeper level of the human psyche than can really be figured out. (Thank God! Or we would be screwed.)

Scott Adams is somewhere in the general area of trying to understand what happened, and I respect what he wrote, but he's not being completely serious and he's into winning bigly for himself (as he admits from time to time when it's entertaining to do so).

We're very lucky that the thing Trump did cannot be discerned and repeated, certainly not just by some political hack who tries to imitate Trump. It won't even work to — as Trump himself put it — "embrace me" and "what I stand for."

Trump followed his own instincts, and what he said and did came from inside himself, and that's why it felt frighteningly impulsive to many of us. It was quite bizarre. No one else can do what he did, but can they do something like what he did? You have to be somebody. The person who's come closest so far is Bernie Sanders.

Have you seen this awful anti-Gillespie ad?

I'm only seeing that now because I'm reading that it was talked about on last Sunday's "Meet the Press," where Chuck Todd interviewed the DNC chair Tom Perez. The ad (above) is played and Todd asks:

Aren't you stereotyping? Are all pickup trucks--I drive a pickup truck. I mean, are all pickup truck drivers racist? That’s what the ad--do you understand why some people think the ad implies that?

Perez plunges into distraction and evasion:

Well, Chuck, let's be clear...

(That is, let's not be clear.)

... about what's happening in the race in Virginia and in all too many races, dog-whistle politics. Steve Bannon just endorsed Ed Gillespie in Virginia this morning. And throughout this campaign, Ed Gillespie has been fear mongering. He's been doing the same thing Donald Trump did. That's not fair. That's not right. Virginia, under Ralph Northam's leadership, under Justin Fairfax leadership, they're looking for a way to unite people.

The ad is the opposite of attempting to unite people.

And Ed Gillespie, throughout the campaign, has been dividing people. And when you, when you hit the bully back, and the bully starts crying, those are crocodile tears to me.

The ad isn't hitting Gillespie. It's generating amorphous fear that some ill-defined evil is out to do something symbolized by mowing down children with a truck.

Perez registered no shame or regret about that ad.

ADDED: That ad made me think about something Scott Adams wrote in "Win Bigly":

Fear can be deeply persuasive. But not all fear-related persuasion is equal. To maximize your fear persuasion, follow these guidelines.

A big fear is more persuasive than a small one.

A personal fear is more persuasive than a generic national problem.

A fear that you think about most often is stronger than one you rarely think about.

A fear with a visual component is scarier than one without.

A fear you have experienced firsthand (such as a crime) is scarier than a statistic.

I'd say that pickup truck ad followed all the guidelines for maximizing fear persuasion. It went too far and got criticism, and yet the criticism made it viral. I'm passing it on, and you can probably tell that I hope that looking at it together and being critical lifts us above our animal instincts and helps us resist irrational fear. But I don't know. Maybe that visual image, the truck coming after the children is still lodged in my head, affecting my decisions.

"Gillespie is establishment. He hasn’t said one word about Trump. It’s a hold-your-nose vote, but I have to vote for him. We don’t want that goddamn Northam."

Said Bobbe Scruggs, "an 88-year-old retired administrative assistant who was excited about Stewart in the primary and now dutifully attended a picnic for Gillespie in Beaverdam."

Quoted in "What Va. voters can agree on: These guys and Trump are from different planets" (WaPo). The headline on the front page is different: "In Virginia governor’s race, two low-octane candidates vie for votes beyond their bases."

"No Apologies: Why Mitt Romney Should Own His Rapaciousness."

That's the headline provided by email from The New Republic for this article by Timothy Noah, which, at the page, is headlined "Mitt Romney, Crybaby Capitalist."

I know, Noah is irritating if you're not rooting against Romney, but isn't there something to this point? It's something David Gregory kept trying to bring out on "Meet the Press" last Sunday. First, he was talking to Ed Gillespie (Senior Adviser, Romney 2012 Campaign/Former Chair, Republican National Committee), and I'll just ignore Gillespie's evasions. Here's Gregory, spliced together: