A Republican candidate backed by President Donald Trump, who is locked in a tight purple state race, got some good polling news on Monday.
Jason Miyares, the incumbent GOP attorney general of Virginia, has surged ahead of his highly controversial Democratic challenger, Jay Jones, according to a Quantus Insights survey.
Miyares has not only closed the gap with Jones, but he has also taken a 7-point lead, 49-42 percent, with 7 percent undecided and 2 percent choosing other candidates.
Earlier this month, Virginia politics were thrown into turmoil after screenshots surfaced of three-year-old private text messages in which Jones fantasized about shooting then-GOP House Speaker Todd Gilbert and his children.
The Virginia Monitor noted: “The National Review story revealed an August 2022 exchange between Jones — a former Norfolk delegate and one-time assistant attorney general — and Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield. In the texts, Jones described a scenario in which Gilbert ‘gets two bullets to the head,’ followed by a wish that the Republican lawmaker’s children ‘die in their mother’s arms.’”
“The messages, sent shortly after Gilbert offered public condolences over the death of retired Democratic Del. Joe Johnson of Washington County, stunned political circles across Virginia and beyond. Coyner confirmed the authenticity of the exchange in a statement Friday evening, calling the remarks “disgusting and unbecoming of any public official,” the outlet added.
“On August 8, 2022 I had a text conversation with Jay Jones,” Coyner said. “What he said was not just disturbing but disqualifying for anyone who wants to seek public office. Jay Jones wished violence on the children of a colleague and joked about shooting Todd Gilbert.”
The disclosure immediately upended an already heated statewide race. After initially declining to respond, Miyares denounced his opponent during a hastily arranged news conference in Richmond.
“The attorney general is the chief law enforcement officer of Virginia,” Miyares said. “It must be done with character and integrity. Jay Jones has proven he is reckless, biased, and willing to trade away his integrity. This conduct is disqualifying.”
Miyares added that he had “sat with crying victims” of violent crime as a prosecutor and called Jones’s comments “the kind of darkness that disqualifies anyone from holding public office.”
GOP Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin noted a similar sentiment in a post on X, describing Jones’ messages as “violent, disgusting rhetoric targeted at an elected official and his children.”
“Jay Jones said that ‘Gilbert gets two bullets to the head’ and then hoped his children would die,” Youngkin wrote. “There is no ‘gosh, I’m sorry’ here. Jones doesn’t have the morality or character to drop out of this race.”
Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, now the Republican nominee for governor, took it a step further, seeking to link the controversy to her Democratic opponent, former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, per the Virginia Monitor.
“Jay Jones is the poster child for the Democrat establishment and he fantasizes about murdered little children laying lifeless in their mother’s arms,” Earle-Sears said in a statement. “My opponent Abigail Spanberger urges her supporters to fill their hearts with violent hate. ‘Let your rage fuel you,’ she says. Words have meaning.”
Jones’ remarks have also reached the White House. President Donald Trump denounced them, as did Vice President JD Vance.
Trump wrong on Truth Social that “the Radical Left Lunatic, Jay Jones,” who is running against “the GREAT Attorney General in Virginia, Jason Miyares,” had made “SICK and DEMENTED jokes, if they were jokes at all,” about “the murdering of a Republican Legislator, his wife, and their children.”
Vance added: “The Democrat candidate for AG in Virginia has been fantasizing about murdering his political opponents. I’m sure the people hyperventilating about sombrero memes will join me in calling for this very deranged person to drop out of the race.”
