My thoughts on VA

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There was a late tea party element to 2014. Ben Sasse was originally elected, believe it or not, as a late Tea Party-style candidate.

As for 2016, you can thank Hillary for her GOP courtship strategy, this purposely damaged the DNC downballot. It was more about Hillary's strategy of pandering to republicans than intrinsic GOP strength.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/how-a-decision-in-may-changed-the-general-election

Gillespie's campaign tried to do both the Jeb/Rubio style pandering combined with Trumpist red meat tactics (which is basically what Cruz tried to do):

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/06/ed-gillespie-virginia-governor-race-244605

In fact, Hillary's original strategy was to literally run as a populist continuation of Obama 2012, while Jeb/Rubio wanted to run a campaign based on superficial pandering to suburban democrats (Hillary in reverse).