WINCHESTER, Virginia — The one thing that has been consistent in covering Virginia’s off-year statewide elections since as far back as the year Republicans George Allen and Jim Gilmore ran for governor and attorney general, respectively, in 1993 is that the races really don’t start moving until September.
And when they do, they move fast.
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Allen began that summer trailing badly in his race against Democrat Mary Sue Terry. Early polling showed her earning 56% support of Virginia’s voters to Allen’s 27%.
By September of that year, Allen had cut Terry’s lead from 18 percentage points to 6, according to the Mason-Dixon polling at that time that showed him trailing her 46%-40%.
Gilmore, who was running against Democrat Bill Dolan for attorney general, had also moved into a close race against Dolan.
Allen won by a whopping 58% of the vote to Terry’s 41%, marking the first time a Republican had won a statewide election since 1977. Gilmore defeated Dolan by 10 percentage points.
The pattern repeated for GOP candidates in the race between Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds in 2009, and then between now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) and Democrat Terry McAuliffe in 2021.
The headline race here is the one between Democrat Abigail Spanberger and Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R-VA). The latest polls show Spanberger leading by double digits.
But in the attorney general race between incumbent Republican Jason Miyares and Jay Jones, a Democratic candidate who is further left than Spanberger, Jones only leads Miyares by 6 points, a statistically insignificant lead because of the margin of error.
Several things might move this race further toward Miyares, beginning with Jones’s questionable behavior regarding two recent revelations about his sense of entitlement and character.
First on the latter: In 2022, Jones was busted for reckless driving by a state trooper for clocking an astounding 116 miles per hour down Interstate 64 in New Kent County. It gets worse. The son of two judges struck a deal to skirt Virginia’s mandatory one-year jail sentence for reckless driving that allowed him to do 1,000 hours of community service and pay a $1,500 fine. How he did the community service is where it gets even more interesting. In January 2024, his own political action committee, Meet our Moment, which recruits and trains minority Democratic candidates to run for Virginia offices, and the Virginia chapter of the NAACP both attested that Jones completed 500 hours of community service each.
It gets worse, stunningly worse.
On Friday, Audrey Fahlberg of the National Review reported that Jones sent a Virginia lawmaker a text joking about shooting former state House Speaker Todd Gilbert, saying that if faced with the choice of murdering Gilbert or two dictators, he’d shoot Gilbert “every time.”
Beyond how flawed Jones is, what makes Miyares so compelling is that, whether he wins or loses his reelection to his seat in November, he will still emerge as a formidable contender for Virginia governor in four years.
Miyares, whose mother fled Cuba alone without resources as a teenager, did the improbable four years ago when he first ran for attorney general. He was the first candidate to defeat the incumbent attorney general in Virginia in well over 100 years.
The contest between him and Jones, the scion of a Beltway political dynasty, is also an interesting microcosm of how much both parties, not just their bases but also their candidates, have changed.
The former Democratic lawmaker is the son of two prosecutors who became judges. He attended prep school, while Miyares grew up in a house with a single mother and went to public school. This is a reflection of how much the resumes of candidates for both parties have shifted in the era of conservative populism.
Despite being the incumbent, Miyares still faces an uphill battle. Virginia is still a pretty blue state, though he has done a good job navigating the electorate. He attends naturalization ceremonies embracing new Americans, yet he also enforces immigration law. One of his standard lines I’ve noticed in his stump speech is, “If your family came to this country looking for a better way of life and they thought America was freedom’s last best hope, chances are your family looks a lot like mine.”
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Heading into October, Miyares was likely down closer to 3, not 6. It is unclear what impact Jones’s speeding ticket and, even more importantly, the dark messages of shooting the state House speaker to a former colleague in the legislature have had on voters. In light of the murder of Charlie Kirk, it’s likely to be impactful.
To date, Miyares has done a solid job of centering his run on local issues and avoiding national ones, much as he did in 2021, a volatile year for Republican candidates. Watching the first Hispanic American elected statewide in Virginia’s reelection efforts this year is the must-watch of the cycle.