The author of the ugliest political ad of 2017 is happy because it worked.

If there were an award for ugliness in this year’s election campaigns, Cristóbal Alex would win hands down. Mr. Alex is president of the Latino Victory Fund, which released a television ad featuring minority children fleeing a sinister white man in a pickup truck trying to run them down. The truck bore a bumper sticker for Ed Gillespie, the GOP candidate for Virginia Governor who ended up losing. Though the ad was pulled before the election, Mr. Alex said in the Washington Post on Thursday he’d run it again. Mr. Alex says Mr. Gillespie’s support for not tearing down the state’s confederate monuments, his ads targeting the MS-13 gang responsible for several murders in Virginia and his attack on his rival for not supporting a bill to ban sanctuary cities add up to “hate.” Leave aside that Democrat Ralph Northam flip-flopped and endorsed the Gillespie position on sanctuary cities. The idea that an attack on a Latino criminal gang is an attack on all Latinos is an insult to law-abiding Latinos. Mr. Alex claims that he “never intended to paint all Gillespie voters as racist,” a subtlety we missed. But he also concedes what really matters: He’s proud of the ad because he says it was “undeniably effective” in helping Mr. Northam prevail. Most of the progressive arbiters of political decorum who denounced Mr. Gillespie never objected to Mr. Alex’s ad, so expect more in the future.

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