VA Dems brush off toxic Jones, Spanberger scandals as GOP mounts October offensive

Virginia Democrats appeared poised to sweep the top offices of the Old Dominion in its upcoming state elections as the party rank and file ignore a pair of extremism scandals involving their top-ticket candidates.

Both gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger and attorney general candidate Jay Jones have found themselves mired in public scrutiny in the past few days. Spanberger’s past employment at a Saudi-controlled school with known links to Hamas reentered the news in recent days.

More shocking perhaps, is a number of Democrats turning a bind eye to text chats involving Jones fantasizing about the deaths of his political opponents and their children.

Both stories have dominated headlines.

Thus far, public polling has yet to assess the impact of those developments on either race, but last-minute scandals, colloquially known as “October surprises” have traditionally been capable of upending races once thought to be runaways.

At present, however, there is no measurable data to suggest that either Democrat has suffered from the cycle of poor press, despite Republicans seizing on the scandals in the hopes of making the races more competitive.

Jones’s violent text fantasies: "P*ss on graves"

Last week, the National Review obtained August 2022 text messages that Jones  sent to a Democratic state representative, saying “Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, Hitler and Pol Pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.” His comments appeared to reference then-House Speaker Todd Gilbert, R. He has since apologized for his remarks.

Republicans have uniformly condemned Jones and called on him to drop out of the race. President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin, R-Va., all issued statements to that effect within days. The Virginia Fraternal Order of Police on Monday, moreover, joined the calls for Jones to drop out.

"It has just come out that the Radical Left Lunatic, Jay Jones, who is running against Jason Miyares, the GREAT Attorney General in Virginia, made SICK and DEMENTED jokes, if they were jokes at all, which were not funny, and that he wrote down and sent around to people, concerning the murdering of a Republican Legislator, his wife, and their children," Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday.

Jones, for his part, has not denied sending the messages, and instead offered an apology, saying: "I want to issue my deepest apology to Speaker Gilbert and his family. Reading back those words made me sick to my stomach. I am embarrassed, ashamed, and sorry… I have reached out to Speaker Gilbert to apologize directly to him, his wife Jennifer, and their children. I cannot take back what I said; I can only take full accountability and offer my sincere apology," Jones said.

Condemnation in name only, no demand for withdrawal from Dems

Democrats, however, have renewed their support for Jones in the wake of the scandal. Neither Spanberger nor either Democratic senator for Virginia have urged him to drop out, at least publicly. One Virginia House of Delegates candidate, Melody Cartwright, even posted her continued support for Jones on X, going viral due to the bombardment of comments suggesting that she supported the deaths of political opponents. The post had 2.4 million views as of press time. 

Nonetheless, some Democrats have made soothing comments, nominally, at least deploring Jones' encouragement to violence. CBS News reported that Jones faced condemnation from both Republicans and Democrats on Friday after text messages from 2022 resurfaced in which he said he would "p*ss on [the] graves" of GOP opponents and mused about hypothetically shooting then-Republican Speaker of the House of Delegates Todd Gilbert.

CBS reported that Rep. Abigail Spanberger, Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial nominee, swiftly condemned Jones's comments. "I spoke frankly with Jay about my disgust with what he had said and texted," Spanberger said Friday. "What I have also made clear is that as a candidate — and as the next governor of our commonwealth — I will always condemn threatening language in our politics." 

Spanberger’s ISA employment

Spanberger’s employment at the Islamic Saudi Academy from 2002-2003 originally made news during her campaign for Congress in 2018. She stood by her work with the ISA at the time. 

A recent review of the academy by Just the News, however, found that the school educated the son of a Hamas leader, used textbooks encouraging hate toward non-Muslims, stated that the Saudi Ministry of Education guided it, and that its comptroller had links to Hamas. 

That issue is unrelated to her ticket-mate's statement that if he were presented with a hypothetical situation in which he had only two bullets and was faced with the choice of shooting [GOP member] Gilbert, former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler or former Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, he'd shoot Gilbert "every time." 

"Gilbert gets two bullets to the head," Jones wrote.

Just the News published its review on Monday, meaning survey data has not yet recorded any possible impact.

Democrats were (and still are) coasting

Up until recently, Democrats were expected to sweep the Virginia elections. The commonwealth has steadily drifted to the left at the presidential level since 2008. The state boasts two Democratic senators and Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s, R-Va., gubernatorial win in 2021 was widely regarded as an upset.

Republicans have largely trailed their Democratic opponents in polling data throughout the campaign, though they began to close the gap in August. Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, for instance, surged from 26% support in May to 39% in August, according to Roanoke College. Conducted Aug. 11-15, the survey questioned 702 Virginia residents and has a margin of error among likely voters of +/- 4.39%.

A recent Christopher Newport University survey, conducted in late September and early October, found Spanberger with a 10% lead over Earle-Sears and Jones with a 6% lead over Republican AG Jason Miyares. Fourteen percent of respondents, moreover, had already voted. That survey, notably, predated the Jones scandal, suggesting a substantial portion of the electorate cast their ballots before even becoming aware of the issue. Conducted Sept. 29-Oct. 1, the survey questioned 805 registered voters in Virginia and has a margin of error of +/- 3.9%.

Likely Democratic voters becoming numb to statements encouraging violence?

One might think that political scientists and poll-watchers would expect Jones' statements to be a game-changer, but so far, they haven't.

Betting odds have remained remarkably stable. Bet-tracker Polymarket odds currently assign Spanberger a 95% chance of winning the governor’s mansion, essentially unchanged from one month ago. The betting for the attorney general’s race, however, only opened after Jones’s scandal broke, but still assigns him a 54% chance of winning as of press time.

Ben Whedon is the Chief Political Correspondent at Just the News. Follow him on X.