I remember the day I realized that Mitt Romney would lose the 2012 presidential election. The headline read: Ed Gillespie Joins Team Romney [By Jonathan Martin, Politico, April 5, 2010].

As soon as Romney tapped one of the country’s highest-paid and hardest-working cheap labor lobbyists as a senior strategist, it was obvious—or at least it should have been obvious—that his campaign was doomed.

Under the guiding hand of Ed Gillespie, Mitt Romney gradually switched gears, abandoned the many promises of stronger enforcement that he made during the primaries and began to signal renewed support for Amnesty for illegal aliens. Not surprisingly (at least to us VDARE.co readers), this reversal of strategy won him few Hispanic votes and discouraged many whites from voting at all—and it was low white voter turnout, not the Hispanic vote, that cost Romney the election.

Now Ed Gillespie aspires to take his losing ways to the U.S. Senate by seeking the Republican nomination in Virginia.( He's the favorite, but there are three other minor candidates—the convention is June 7.) His opponent, Democrat Mark Warner (NumbersUSA D), may be no better, but he surely can’t be any worse. 

Ed Gillespie has carried a lot of water for the Treason Lobby over the years. From 1985-1995, he served as a top aide to Open Borders fanatic Rep. Dick Armey. Next, he became Communications Director for the Republican National Committee under another Open Borders advocate, Haley Barbour.

In 2000, Gillespie joined the presidential campaign of George W. Bush where one of his duties was to oversee the 2000 Republican National Convention. Gillespie deliberately sought to strike a multicultural theme among the convention speakers in order to attract more minority votes (remember George P. Bush’s telling  a Hispanic Republican rally in 2000 that  his mother "told me we have to fight for our race”? [Reuters, August 2, 2000]

During that same year, Gillespie founded a “bipartisan” lobbying firm with Jack Quinn, a longtime Democratic operative who served in the Clinton Administration. Quinn is perhaps best known for arranging the infamous pardon of fugitive plutocrat Marc Rich.

Together, Quinn and Gillespie have tirelessly done the bidding of the Cheap Labor Lobby, with clients such as Bank of America, General Electric, Microsoft, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In 2002, for example, the Justice Department prosecuted Tyson Foods for perpetrating a brazen illegal alien smuggling scheme. Tyson had been smuggling Mexican illegals into the country by paying an immigrant middleman $200 per illegal, and even arranged for phony documents for them. They then paid the illegals low under the table wages at more than a dozen of their chicken processing plants. It’s hard to think of a better example of Big Business contempt for American workers.

So when Tyson Foods was finally busted, who did they hire to do damage control? Quinn Gillespie Associates, who conveniently blamed our “broken immigration system” for the scam rather than their clients.

Indeed, it is hard to think of anything that better illustrates the false paradigm of Democrat v Republican than the partnership of Jack Quinn and Ed Gillespie. While Jack Quinn, like all Democrats, employs the language of race and class warfare to advance a left-wing agenda, Ed Gillespie, like most Republicans, employs patriotic language to reach essentially the same treasonous ends. It’s a difference in style that masks a similarity in substance.

For example, in 2005 Gillespie founded Americans for Border and Economic Security, a Republican political action committee that engaged in superficial tough talk about immigration enforcement but was in substance a slush fund to promote the Open Borders policies of President George W. Bush. Other board members included Dick Armey and former Democratic Rep. Cal Dooley (NumbersUSA F) who left Congress to become an agribusiness lobbyist. Corporations, including Tyson Foods, Walmart, and Microsoft, paid as much as $250,000 for a seat at the table. And you can bet that they didn’t pay that kind of money because they wanted a stronger border fence.

According to The New York Sun, many of the initial meetings of Americans for Border and Economic Security were held in the Washington offices of Quinn Gillespie Associates.  [Tough Talk on Illegal Immigration Scaring Bush Business Allies, By Warren Vieth, November 21, 2005]

Gillespie has spearheaded other PACs that trumpet patriotic themes to camouflage nation-breaking objectives, such as The Committee for the Preservation of Capitalism, Defend America, The Freedom Project, and Resurgent Republic—all of which promote Open Borders policies.

And let’s not forget American Crossroads, which Gillespie cofounded with Karl Rove in 2010. That organization blew countless millions inadvertently ensuring that Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election.

You would think that, given the obvious failures of the 2012 campaign, Ed Gillespie might rethink this whole minority outreach thing. But no. He’s determined that the GOP must now redouble its efforts.

One of Gillespie’s more recent ventures is the GOP’s “Future Majority Project” in which the party has pledged $16 million toward minority outreach for the 2014 election.

All money down the tubes.

The thing about Ed Gillespie is that he has virtually no other conservative bona fides. He even lobbied Congress in support of the individual health care mandate well before Barack Obama was elected (Although that has not stopped him from campaigning against Obamacare since then).

You might say then that there is no way that Ed Gillespie can win the GOP primary in Virginia. But it looks like he has it already rigged it in his favor. The Executive Director of the Virginia Republican Party is Shaun Kenney and guess who he used to work for? Yup, he was previously an aide to Ed Gillespie. And this is what Shaun Kenney recently wrote about patriotic immigration reformers.  

These clowns? These Know Nothings? . . . have no place in our history. They have no place in the history of a Free America. They deserve nothing more than a footnote to the ignorance that liberty rightly stamps out. Conservatives have a moral duty to drive out nativism once and for all . . . Conservatives are smarter than this, and America deserves better than nativist hate. Drive ‘em out, ladies and gentleman.

Nativism vs. Conservatism, Bearing Drift, February 11, 2014 

What Shaun Kenney is too clueless to realize is that what today passes for “nativism” was considered basic common sense for most of American history. By Shaun Kenney’s standards, every one of Virginia’s six presidents was a nativist who would not be welcome in today’s Republican Party.

It’s precisely because of people like Ed Gillespie and Shaun Kenney that many nativists a.k.a. patriotic Americans no longer bother to vote.

In 2013, Ken Cuccinelli lost the Virginia governorship in a low-turnout election, not because he failed to obtain the Hispanic vote but because he failed to galvanize the white vote. Had Cuccinelli not, due to the advice of people like Ed Gillespie, abandoned the strong pro-enforcement positions that he had previously championed, he would probably be governor now.

That is a tragedy, because immigrant crime has become a growing plague in many communities in Virginia. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, more MS-13 gangsters have been apprehended in Virginia than in any other state.

Really, how can pointing this out be politically risky?

It’s not as if Ed Gillespie doesn’t realize how unpopular immigration is with Virginia voters. In fact, he recently removed a video from his website where he touts Amnesty in a cliché-ridden conversation with Larry Kudlow. [Ed Gillespie Removes Clip Touting Immigration Reform, By Daniel Strauss, TPM, January 14, 2014]

So this is a movie we’ve all seen before. Ed Gillespie, like Mitt Romney, will employ some tough talk about border security before the primary in order to build the voters’ confidence in him, and then he will switch gears before the general election and hope that they will still pull the lever for him in November.

A liberal Republican is still better than a liberal Democrat, right?

Not really. Given the choice between an Open Borders Democrat and an Open Borders Republican, an increasing number of voters are choosing to stay home and not vote at all. [Study: Republicans Leaving Party Are Tired of 'Two Evils' Argument, by Joel B. Pollak, Breitbart.com, July 2, 2013]

Republicans often like to talk of having a “big tent.” In the Alice in Wonderland logic of today’s GOP, however, the tent is big enough to welcome those who support abortion, gay marriage and a host of other left-wing policies—but not big enough to support genuine immigration reformers because, as Shaun Kenney might say, we have been driven out.

Still, nature abhors a vacuum. And my hunch is that as Republican voters continue to abandon the party that long ago abandoned them, they will inevitably find a new party that will finally represent their interests.

Matthew Richer (email him) is a writer living in Massachusetts. He is the former American Editor of Right NOW magazine.