Virginia lieutenant governor and Republican gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears’s campaign launched a seven-figure ad buy on Tuesday featuring opponent Abigail Spanberger’s refusal to say whether Jay Jones, the Democrats’ scandal-plagued attorney general candidate, would have to shoot his political opponents himself to lose her support.
The ad, shared with the Washington Free Beacon, shows Spanberger keeping her mouth shut during Thursday’s debate when asked about the text messages in which Jones said he wanted to kill a GOP lawmaker and have the lawmaker’s wife watch her child die in her arms.
“Would it take him pulling the trigger?” Earle-Sears asked. “Is that what would do it, and then you would say he needs to get out of the race, Abigail?”
Spanberger, refusing to acknowledge Earle-Sears’s presence, stayed stone-faced.
“You have nothing to say?” Earle-Sears continued, asking Spanberger what would happen if Jones said the same about her own children. “Is that when you would say he should get out of the race, Abigail?”
Throughout the 30-second clip, titled “Trigger” with the tagline “Her Silence Says it All,” Spanberger does not open her mouth or look in Earle-Sears’s direction once. The ad, which will run in every major media market in the state on both television and the internet, captures one lowlight in a debate in which Spanberger refused five times to withdraw her endorsement of Jones.
Jones’s polling numbers against incumbent attorney general Jason Miyares (R.) have taken a nosedive since National Review uncovered text messages Jones sent in 2022 to Virginia house Rep. Carrie Coyner (R.), in which he fantasized about shooting his Republican colleague, Todd Gilbert.
“Gilbert gets two bullets to the head,” Jones told Coyner as he laid out a hypothetical “three people, two bullets” scenario, listing Gilbert alongside Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot. Jones also wrote that he would go to Republican colleagues’ funerals to “piss on their graves” and “send them out awash in something.” He then suggested in a call with Coyner that he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own children die so that Gilbert would change his political views.
Once ahead of Miyares by a comfortable margin in most polls, Jones now finds himself lagging behind his GOP opponent. A recent survey by the Trafalgar Group—the most accurate polling firm in Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial election—spells bad news for Spanberger as well: She now leads Earle-Sears by just 2.6 percentage points among likely voters, within the poll’s margin of error, showing a race tightening considerably since Jones’s texts became public.
The Earle-Sears campaign’s ad buy demonstrates that the lieutenant governor’s camp believes Spanberger—who has declined to answer questions about whether boys should play in girls’ sports as well—is more vulnerable than ever as Election Day draws near.
Earle-Sears press secretary Peyton Vogel told the Free Beacon that Spanberger’s refusal to disavow Jones is sure to shake Virginians’ faith in her ability to lead the Old Dominion.
“This moment tells Virginians everything they need to know about Abigail Spanberger’s priorities,” Vogel said. “Jay Jones’s violent remarks should have been an easy line to draw but, instead of showing leadership and calling on him to drop out, Abigail is staying loyal to her ticket fueled by rage. If she can’t call out that kind of behavior in her own party, how can Virginians trust Spanberger to lead the Commonwealth?”
Jones’s bloodthirsty texts are not the only black mark on his record. The Democratic attorney general hopeful was convicted of reckless driving in 2022 after police found him driving 116 miles per hour on a highway. He also reportedly told Coyner—the same colleague he sent the murderous messages—that police might “move on” and “stop shooting people” if “a few of them died.”
“Well, maybe if a few of them died, that they would move on, not shooting people, not killing people,” Coyner quoted Jones as saying.
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