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Pressure is mounting on Virginia Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones to drop out of his race following leaked text messages in which he openly talks about violence directed toward former Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert (R).
A chorus of Republicans in and out of Virginia are calling on Jones to drop out, including President Trump and Vice President Vance. The Republican gubernatorial nominee, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R), quickly jumped on the news, rolling out an ad tying her opponent Democrat Abigail Spanberger to Jones. Jones’s opponent Jason Miyares (R) released his own ad on Monday, asking voters if they could trust Jones to protect their children.
Spanberger has distanced herself from the comments, saying in a statement that she conveyed her “disgust” to Jones over the texts. But she’s likely to face growing pressure over the development as Republicans use the story to attack her and other Democrats, arguing she isn’t going far enough by not calling on him to drop out.
“In October there’s not a lot of things that can actually cut through, this is one of them, both for the AG race, and then up the ballot and down the ballot,” said Zack Roday, Virginia-based Republican strategist who formerly worked with Youngkin’s Spirit of Virginia PAC.
“This is going to motivate a whole lot of infrequent voters,” he continued. “And it absolutely will persuade people to second guess, like actual people, their priors. They very well may consider split ticket or changing where they’re going to vote.”
“It’s also not very difficult to explain,” he added.
The messages, which were sent in 2022, were first reported by the National Review and later published by the Republican Attorneys General Association.
“Three people, two bullets,” Jones said in a text to House Delegate Carrie Coyner (R) about Gilbert.
“Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot,” Jones wrote. “Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.”
“Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time,” Jones told Coyner.
Coyner, in response, told Jones, who at the time did not hold an elected office, to stop.
The National Review also reported that in a follow-up conversation with Coyner, Jones suggested that he wished Gilbert’s wife could see her children die so that her husband would reconsider his political views on gun violence.
Meanwhile, the controversy is threatening to grow. The Virginia Scope reported on Monday that Coyner recalled a 2020 phone call with Jones in which he said if a few police officers died, then maybe they would stop killing people. Jones denied making the comments, according to the outlet.
But Virginia Democrats are largely standing with Jones for now.
In a joint statement on Friday, Virginia Senate Majority Chair Mamie Locke (D) and state Senate President Pro tempore said they “will not allow this moment to overshadow the stakes of this election or to distract from the urgent fight we are all in for Virginia’s lawmakers.”
The two senators condemned Jones’s remarks and noted there was no place for political violence, but added that they know Jones and that state “cannot afford another four years of Donald Trump and Jason Miyares dragging us backward.”
Virginia House Speaker Don Scott (D) condemned the text messages in a statement on Friday, referring to Gilbert as “his friend.”
“What Jay said was harmful, reckless, and wrong,” Scott said. “He needs to apologize now. He must take accountability for his words, and then reflect and pray.”
During a campaign stop over the weekend at a church supporting House of Delegates candidate Lindsey Dougherty, who is challenging Coyner in the district, Scott called the fallout over the text messages a distraction.
“We can’t get distracted because they want us to get distracted by a text message here or something else,” Scott said. “Stay focused.”
Meanwhile on Saturday, the Virginia Beach Democratic Committee reaffirmed their support for Jones, noting that he has taken responsibility and apologized.
“Recent press may have highlighted past mistakes,” the committee said in a statement. “We say, let those without sin cast the first stone.”
On Sunday, Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-Va.), who represents the state’s 7th Congressional District, urged voters in an X post to “make a plan to vote” for Spanberger, Democratic lieutenant governor nominee Ghazala Hashmi and Jones.
The Congressional Leadership Fund, a GOP super PAC, said in their own statement that Vindman’s post “tell Virginians everything they need to know about how radical Eugene Vindman is.”
Jones himself has apologized, saying he wished that he hadn’t made the remarks in the first place and that he would take them back if he could.
Still, his apology has done little to quell the controversy. On Monday, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) called on him to quit the race.
“They have got to call on this guy to resign, step down, get out of this race in disgrace because this is beyond disqualifying. I mean, they’re asking people to vote for this guy to be the attorney general of the commonwealth of Virginia?” Youngkin said in an interview with “Fox and Friends.”
Not everyone calling on Jones to end his bid is a Republican or an ally of the party. On Monday, television host Joe Scarborough said on the left-leaning “Morning Joe” on MSNBC that Jones should “probably be forced to drop out the race.”
Republicans were already most hopeful about the attorney general race, pointing to Miyares as a strong incumbent. Polling showed that the race was narrower than the other races on the ticket. A Christopher Newport University poll released last month showed Spanberger leading Earle-Sears by 12 points with eight percent undecided. Jones, on the other hand, led Miyares by seven points with 12 percent undecided.
Republicans also point to the shift in the state’s 2021 governor’s race in late September when former Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) said at a debate that he did not believe parents should be telling schools what they should teach.
“The numbers didn’t fully shift until Terry McAuliffe said a horrible, quiet-part-out-loud statement about parents’ involvement in their kids’ education,” said Matt Whitlock, a Virginia-based GOP strategist who has worked on a number of races in the state.
“Democrats spent weeks after that trying to pretend it didn’t happen, but it ended up shifting the entire dynamic of the race,” he continued.
It’s unclear whether Spanberger and other Virginia Democrats will call on Jones to step down from the ticket. Lucas, Locke and Scott are three prominent Black leaders in Virginia’s legislature who have backed Jones, who is also Black, making any potential call for him to quit potentially tricky.
Trump’s move to insert himself into the matter with his TruthSocial post, meanwhile, could prove to be risky for Republicans in the state where his approval rating is already under water. The same Christopher Newport University poll showed the president with a 39 percent approval rating and a 58 percent disapproval rating.
Still, one Virginia Republican operative called the development “a massive turning point” in the general election.
“If you cannot call on that person to drop out of the race after these horrific murder fantasization texts were released, then you have no business being the leader of the commonwealth,” the operative said.
