Copyright Slate
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. There was a time when suggesting that your opponents should watch their children die would automatically cost you an election. That era appears to be over, after Democrat Jay Jones was elected to be Virginia’s next attorney general on Tuesday night. Jones had for most of the race held a tight lead over the incumbent, Republican Jason Miyares, and been a fairly unremarkable candidate. And it seemed until early October that his election would come down to a referendum on how Virginians felt about the Republican Party. It was a good place for him to be, given that the state typically votes against the party in the White House, but it wasn’t a sure bet. The race changed suddenly on October 3 when the National Review revealed a series of text messages Jones had sent to a colleague three years earlier. The messages were starkly violent. In one exchange, he wrote this of the Republican Todd Gilbert, then the House Speaker: Three people, two bullets Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot 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 According to the National Review, Jones called the colleague who received the texts, Republican House Delegate Carrie Coyner, in order to defend himself, arguing that Republican lawmakers experiencing pain firsthand was necessary for change. “He suggested he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views [on gun violence], prompting Coyner to hang up the phone in disgust,” the National Review reported. The National Review’s portrayal of that conversation was supported by later texts between Jones and Coyner, in which Coyner wrote that Jones had been hoping “Jennifer Gilbert’s children would die.” “Yes,” Jones responded. “I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.” Given the extreme nature of these texts, it’s not surprising that Democrats faced calls to withdraw their support for Jones. The texts emerged shortly after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, raising the pitch of the conversation around political violence and creating a popular Republican narrative around left-wing tendencies towards violence. Jones did apologize, and Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee for governor, did condemn Jones’ remarks as “abhorrent”. But Spanberger did not stop backing Jones’ candidacy. Nor did the rest of the Democratic Party reject Jones: At a recent campaign event, Jones appeared on stage before Sen. Tim Kaine and former President Barack Obama. Jones’ victory Tuesday is a snapshot of a hyper-polarized nation, where voters are willing to look past their own candidates’ failures because they see the alternative as an existential threat to the country—and to their own wellbeing. For Republicans, this may be disconcerting, even incomprehensible. To Democrats, however, there’s an air of familiarity. A few days from now will mark the 9-year anniversary of Donald Trump becoming president a month after the world listened to a tape of him bragging about repeated sexual assault. In part, these Democrats stuck by Jones because they knew his position would be important in challenging the Trump administration in legal battles. This race was also the Republicans’ best shot at getting power in the state government. Spanberger had consistently led her race in polling, despite efforts from her opponent to tie her to Jones’ texts. She cruised to victory on Tuesday, replacing Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who was term-limited. But Jones’ race was always close. Jones, a former state delegate, had positioned himself as a candidate who would fight the Trump administration. Miyares, a former prosecutor who served three terms as a state delegate, had campaigned on fighting culture war issues on behalf of conservatives. He had created an election integrity unit while in office, aggressively investigated gender-affirming schools, and joined a number of lawsuits against the Biden administration. Jones had promised to similarly challenge the Trump administration, with concern for abortion access, voting access, and criminal justice reform. In other words, the fight was, until Jones’ texts emerged, largely a typical battle between two modern partisans. The Miyares-Jones race was the most expensive attorney general race in Virginia’s history. Jones had failed at obtaining the office once before, losing the Democratic primary for attorney general in 2021 to the Democratic incumbent, who Miyares later beat. Jones, the son of two prominent judges, served in Virginia’s House of Delegates from 2018 to 2021. Before the texting scandal, he had hoped to be a rising star in the party: the Virginia attorney general is a highly visible position, nationally. It’s unclear what Tuesday’s win will mean for Jones’ future, but he’ll likely carry the scandal into his future career. In part, that’s because even if the threats weren’t enough on their own, the texting story showed distasteful sides of Jones’ private personality. In the exchange, Jones wrote that if his Republican colleagues died before him, “I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves.” He also wrote that Gilbert, who has two young sons, was “breeding little fascists.” And it wasn’t his only scandal that week: The day before, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that Jones, after being convicted for reckless driving, had managed to avoid jail time by striking a deal to perform community service—and then went on to label work at his own political action committee as part of that time. Thousands of votes had already been cast by the time Jones’ texts emerged, blunting some of the effect of the scandal. But regardless, pundits will likely look to Jones’ victory as a sign of Virginia voters’ anger and anxiety with the ongoing presidential administration and Republican Congress—to the point of supporting a man who fantasized about children dying.
