Embattled Democrat Jay Jones, who spent recent weeks embroiled in a scandal surrounding violent text messages he sent in 2022, won Virginia’s off-year attorney general contest on Tuesday evening against GOP incumbent Jason Miyares. Jones’s victory was a major defeat for Republicans, who spent millions in advertising in the final stretch of the campaign to boost Miyares.
Jones was leading 53 percent to Miyares’s 47 percent with 90 percent of ballots cast when the Associated Press called the race.
Jones was helped across the finish line by Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger, who soundly defeated Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears in the race for governor.
Jones managed to survive a major political scandal that threatened to blow up his candidacy: National Review revealed on October 3 that Jones had sent a series of text messages to a former Republican state legislative colleague in 2022 fantasizing about shooting Virginia’s then Republican House Speaker Todd Gilbert and wishing death on his children.
The polls tightened considerably in the final weeks as the scandal permeated Virginia’s news outlets and advertising markets. And yet the backlash to Jones’s vile rhetoric — and the advertising money that flowed into Virginia on Miyares’s behalf as a result — wasn’t enough to help Miyares stem the bleeding, even though his race’s electoral margins were much closer than the rest of the ticket.
In the final weeks of the race, Democratic house of delegates and statewide candidates were asked constantly about Jones’s controversial text exchange, as well as the attorney general candidate’s 2022 reckless driving conviction for driving 116 mph in a 70 mph zone on a Virginia highway. Both scandals were a major topic of conversation during the attorney general and gubernatorial debates, candidate fundraisers, and ad spots, and even resulted in multiple bar complaints against Jones in Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Despite his election, the legal troubles may not be over for Jones as his sentence on that reckless driving conviction is now under investigation by a special prosecutor in Virginia.
Jones was sentenced to a $1,500 fine and 1,000 hours of community service, 500 of which he served for his own political action committee. On October 9, the New Kent County commonwealth’s attorney told a Virginia news outlet that he was looking into how Jones had cleared his community service hours, considering his ties to the PAC as well as the organization’s political mission.
Late last month, the New Kent County commonwealth’s attorney recused himself in the probe over an unspecified potential conflict and requested a special prosecutor appointment, which a circuit court justice granted, as National Review first reported, raising even more questions about the nature of the ongoing probe into a legal matter that was ostensibly finalized nearly two years ago.
None of this was enough to sink Jones, who benefited from Virginia’s blue-leaning tint, the government shutdown, unified Republican control of Washington, and early voting, which began on September 19. The political environment was also considerably different from 2o21, when voters’ frustrations with critical race theory and pandemic-era school strictures in K–12 schools helped private equity CEO Glenn Youngkin pull the GOP ticket to victory, flipping the commonwealth red for the first time in twelve years.
This time around, intra-GOP tensions also rocked the campaign. While the Republican ticket ended the final few weeks on a more unified footing, the ticket spent the summer embroiled in infighting over allegations that John Reid — the GOP’s lieutenant-governor nominee, a Richmond talk show host, and the state’s first openly gay statewide nominee — had reposted photos of nude men on a Tumblr account years ago. On hearing the allegations in late April, Virginia’s Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin privately demanded that Reid, who denies the allegations, suspend his campaign, but he refused.
The drama created tensions on the GOP ticket over the summer. Following the scandal, Earle-Sears, Miyares, and Reid declined to campaign as a united ticket for weeks, causing their tense relationships to burst into public view, and eventually, into news headlines.
“I’ve tried very diligently to be positive about you and the ticket and both in public and private,” Reid said on a private June 18 phone call with Earle-Sears, first reported by National Review in mid-August. “But I’m not going to lie and act like everything’s been hunky-dory. It’s been eight weeks since we’ve spoken. I’m puzzled about that. I don’t know why that is.”
The GOP ticket became more unified in the fall following a staff shake-up on the Earle-Sears campaign. But in the end, the ticket’s “defend and deliver” message wasn’t convincing enough to voters: All three Republican statewide candidates lost, returning Virginia back into Democratic hands.