Things are looking fairly optimistic right now for Jason Miyares.
It’s hard these days to buck the trend of straight-ticket voting, but it’s not impossible. Jason Miyares may yet pull that off in the Virginia attorney general race. A new Suffolk University poll of 500 likely voters taken October 19-21 underscores the trend: The governor’s race continues to look grim for Winsome Earle-Sears, who trails Abigail Spanberger by 51.8 percent to 43.2 percent. In the RealClearPolitics poll average of the race, Spanberger leads by 50.3 percent to 43.8 percent. A Trafalgar poll from ten days ago is the closest in the RCP database, and it still has Spanberger up three. Barring a very large polling miss or a huge late break in the race, Spanberger seems to have wrapped this up.
But the AG race is different, partly because Miyares is a strong incumbent and Jones is a scandal-ravaged challenger — and partly because it’s Spanberger who is drawing the crossover votes. Suffolk has Miyares up by four points, 46.4 percent to 42.4 percent, albeit with a whopping 9 percent undecided and another 2.2 percent declining to answer. In the RCP average for the race, Miyares now leads 46.4 percent to 43.7 percent. Jones, who led the race by six points in a Christopher Newport University poll taken September 29-October 1, has trailed in every poll since then, following the October 3 publication of Audrey Fahlberg’s report on Jones’s violence-fantasy text messages.
But is the spread between the governor and AG races mostly about the quality of the candidates in the AG race? In the lieutenant governor race, Suffolk has Republican John Reid up a hair on Democrat Ghazala Hashmi, 44.8 percent to 44.6 percent. That race, too, features 8.4 percent of respondents saying they are undecided, and 2.4 percent declining to answer. That may just reflect the lower profile of the lieutenant governor candidates, but it also shows a significant split between Spanberger and the rest of her ticket (or, perhaps, between Earle-Sears and the rest of her ticket, amidst lingering tensions between Earle-Sears and Reid). Then again, consider two prior polls from mid-October: A Quantus Insights poll had Spanberger up 51 percent to 46 percent, Hashmi up 49 percent to 45 percent, and Miyares up 49 percent to 42 percent. A co/efficient poll had Spanberger up 49 percent to 44 percent, Hashmi up 47 percent to 42 percent, and Miyares up 46 percent to 42 percent. Those two polls suggest that Suffolk’s finding of a tied race between Hashmi and Reid is the outlier, and it’s really the AG race that is doing the major ticket-splitting work. Still, Hashmi is plainly running behind Spanberger, if not as far as Suffolk suggests.
In the co/efficient poll, Miyares enjoyed a solid 41 percent favorable to 33 percent unfavorable split, while Jones is deep underwater, viewed favorably by 26 percent but unfavorably by 51 percent. In the Suffolk poll, Miyares enjoys a 40 percent to 25.6 percent favorability edge, while Jones is viewed favorably by 26.8 percent and unfavorably by 42.6 percent. Notably, Suffolk found that Glenn Youngkin enjoys a strong 51 percent to 37.4 percent advantage in his approval rating as governor (indicating that the decisive factor in this race may be Virginia’s one-term limit for governors), far outstripping Donald Trump, who is viewed favorably by 39 percent of voters and unfavorably by 54.2 percent, with Virginia voters by a wide margin blaming Republicans rather than Democrats for the government shutdown (27.8 percent blame the congressional GOP and 21.4 percent blame Trump — add those two up, and you get a majority — while only 37.8 percent blame congressional Democrats).
Miyares doesn’t need every split ticket to be a Spanberger/Miyares voter; it will serve his purposes if some of Spanberger’s voters just leave the AG race blank or cast a write-in vote (there are no third-party candidates on the ballot). As Kyle Kondik notes, that is typically a factor of only a few points in Virginia: Over the past four Virginia statewide cycles, there were 98.5 percent as many votes in the lieutenant governor race as in the governor’s race, and 98.6 percent in the race for attorney general. But 1 or 2 percent could easily be enough to decide this race. Things are looking fairly optimistic right now for Miyares.