Virginia’s gubernatorial race was rocked recently by a commercial, paid for by the Latino Victory Fund, depicting a white man trying to run down a group of nonwhite children with his pickup truck. As a black boy and a girl wearing a hijab walk on a peaceful sidewalk, they hear the roar of a turbocharged engine, and a companion yells, “Run!” The truck, flying the Confederate battle flag, and bearing a don’t tread on me Gadsden-flag license plate in front, is otherwise unadorned, except for a gillespie for governor bumper sticker, as its driver aims to slaughter the innocent kids. Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate in what has become a national bellwether campaign, is presented as the standard-bearer for white racist political violence.
Just a few days after the ad aired, of course, a Muslim terrorist from Uzbekistan drove a truck into a walkway of pedestrians and bicyclists in Manhattan. Sayfullo Saipov was devoted to the triumph of the Islamic State and the preservation of its vanishing caliphate. The Latino Victory Fund’s anti-Gillespie commercial would have been more accurate if its pickup-truck driver had turned out to be the dad of the little hijabi girl running for her life.
The ad was pulled after yesterday’s attack. “We knew our ad would ruffle feathers,” said Latino Victory Fund president Cristóbal Alex, as if congratulating himself. Alex didn’t address the cognitive dissonance that his commercial would surely evoke in any informed viewer, or the inversion of reality that is the hallmark of leftist political rhetoric about immigration and the jihadi threat. The Virginia governor’s race has focused heavily on the immigration debate, with Gillespie—who holds positions somewhat to the left of the national Republican Party on amnesty and reform—taking a firm stance in favor of enforcement against illegal immigrant gang members, including MS-13, which has a strong presence in Virginia. Democratic candidate Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam has focused his campaign on the blue suburbs of northern Virginia, reaching out especially to the state’s expanding Asian population.
Casting electoral politics as the old, white America versus the new, vibrant, multiethnic America is a seductive strategy for Democrats, who can’t resist looking at actuarial charts and population graphs that show a nonwhite-majority electorate by 2050, at the latest. But as Hillary Clinton’s disastrous 2016 campaign demonstrated, politicians must be elected by today’s voters, not tomorrow’s. The “inevitability” strategy backfires, in part because white voters generally don’t like being told to expedite and celebrate their coming demise.
The strategy also backfires because rhetoric about the wonders of unfettered immigration meets the reality of horrible terrorism committed by immigrants or their children. The Latino Victory Fund—whose very name suggests ethnic triumphalism—tried to cast even mild immigration-restrictionist sentiment as white supremacism, and to depict Charlottesville murderer James Fields as the typical Gillespie voter. But the reality of terrorism in America is that it is widely and correctly associated with political Islam.