In the Politics of Trans 'Inclusion' and Violence, Virginia Is A 'Ground Zero' Event
Matt Osborne writes on the Virginia Governor's race.
Introduction
Transgender issues have shaped the governor’s race in Virginia in an atmosphere of violence during a period of intense early voting. To understand this complex situation, especially from outside Virginia, which involves multiple dimensions, requires a depth of detail. However, I have done my best to keep things simple and chart-free for the Genspect audience. This essay is the result of two requests for a briefing on the state of the race that I received during or immediately after the Albuquerque conference.
The last time I dove this deep into a statewide race, the memo that I wrote helped elect a United States Senator. I used Reid Hoffman’s money to do that. In 2020, I appeared in Andrew Rossi’s documentary After Truth to explain the “Dry Alabama” project. I had my critics, but they could never accurately explain my theory of the case in their summaries. You not only had to be from Alabama, and know Alabama, you also had to study the local changes in fine detail to know what had changed in Alabama in 2017. My curiosity had led me to discovery, and the formulation of an idea.
I am getting that same buzz from Virginia, though I do not live there, nor am I receiving the same level of funding these days. Oh well.
Past is prologue. In 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin unexpectedly beat Democrat Terry McAuliffe by nearly two points in the Virginia governor’s race. All the big polls had said the candidates were in a statistical tie. Everyone had expected a nail-biter, the kind of election that ends up in recount hell. Instead, the gap was wide enough that all the major press outlets called the race by early Wednesday morning.
Postmortem explanations focused on McAuliffe’s uninspiring establishment credentials, the effects of COVID-19, inflation, the economy, and Joe Biden’s loss of popularity following the debacle in Afghanistan, among other factors. One term stands out in that discussion: ‘parental rights’. Those of us in the fight against genderwoo recognize this euphemism.
During 2021, the consequences of “transgender inclusion” in school restrooms in Loudoun County were shocking to Virginians, especially after a father named Scott Smith was arrested for losing his cool at a school board meeting.
If You Are New to This Insane Story, Here Is the Briefest Synopsis I Can Offer
Mr. Smith’s daughter was raped by a boy in a skirt while both students were standing inside a toilet stall. A teacher witnessed their feet together under the stall door but took no action because of district policy. Later that day, the Loudoun County school district CEO emailed his executive team that “the incident at SBHS is related to policy 8040”, naming the exact policy which allowed the rapist into the girls’ restroom in the first place. The 14-year-old rapist was quietly moved to another school with a mere verbal reprimand while criminal investigation proceeded, whereupon he proceeded to rape a second female student while he still had an opportunity to live his dream.
When Mr. Smith addressed the school board to complain that he had not consented to a boy in his daughter’s school restroom, regardless of whether or not that boy wore a skirt and pronouns, Loudoun Superintendent Scott Zeigler denied that any rape had occurred at all. A grand jury later found this was “a bald faced lie” and Zeigler was fired, but the problem did not get resolved, because of course not. The school district refuses to change.
In the heat of the moment, Mr. Smith was handcuffed and arrested for his understandable response to this odious gaslighting. Despite the best efforts of establishment media to filter out the details of this story, a political grassfire broke out before the election. Youngkin pardoned Smith, who filed a $30 million lawsuit against the school district. For obvious reasons, Democrats — and even some Republicans, for less obvious reasons — still want to minimize the salience of this issue four years later. Too bad for them, because Virginia is out of control. Democrats are out of control. If 2021 was a grassfire, 2025 is a massive political wildfire.
History does not really repeat, but it does rhyme. Today, the Trump administration is holding five Virginia school districts, including Loudoun County, in violation of Title IX for their policies allowing naked males of every age inside female restrooms and locker rooms meant for minor girls. The Department of Education has threatened to cut off federal funding to all five.
The school districts contend that they are merely obeying the notorious Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board decision, which applies only to them. They are holding out until the United States Supreme Court decides to tell them whether boys belong in female single-sex spaces. Taking advantage of this excuse for delay, the school boards refuse to change.
Now, a Mr. Richard Cox, 58, has poured gasoline on the smoldering embers of the old controversy. Perhaps you have heard of Mr. Cox’s naked adventures in three female locker rooms in Virginia’s public schools. Female witnesses have described his male gaze upon them and the associated discomfort they experienced. Here is his mug shot.
When Mr. Cox was finally arrested in Arlington, Virginia, looking at the children’s swim lesson schedules on his phone, he had been sitting fully exposed inside the Barcroft Sports and Fitness Center locker room for an hour. The thing that we have all been told would never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever happen was happening. A convicted pedophile was living his naked dream with women and girls in Virginia.
By that point, Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis had already declined to press charges against Cox for his previous adventures, blaming the policy of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and the park authority that had allowed Cox to access the facilities in the first place.
It would be a mistake to think that Chief Davis is “woke,” however. All of politics is local, and the political play Chief Davis seems to be making here has a name: ‘sandbagging’. In 2021, at the height of George Floyd mania, certain Virginia Democrats tried to have Chief Davis fired for alleged mistreatment of minority suspects. Of course, they failed to produce any evidence of said mistreatment. Now Chief Davis enforces a ridiculous policy made by Democrats so they can be left holding the proverbial bag, which, per the metaphor, is full of sand.
Sandbagging is hardly unusual in these sorts of circumstances. It is a typical tactic of bureaucrats and professionals when they want to be rid of ideological dictates from authoritarian idiots without directly engaging in dangerous partisanship. In fact, we recently witnessed another example with Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley of London when he pleaded powerlessness. Sir Rowley made it clear he expects the politicians in Parliament to fix the law that Graham Linehan’s harassers used to have the official court jester of Genspect arrested at Heathrow.
But I digress: let us fly back to Virginia and Loudoun County Public Schools, where the situation is actually far worse than it was before.
LCPS 2025 Tells LCPS 2021 “Hurr, Hold My Beer”
The same school system that tried to cover up the schoolhouse rapist because he belonged to the sacred class of boys in skirts also recently suspended two normal, well-behaved boys after a girl who ‘identifies’ as a boy recorded the actual boys asking her why she was in their locker room for not-imaginary boys. According to the inside-out, bizarro-world interpretation of Title IX used in Loudoun County public education, the boys are guilty of “sex discrimination.”
Normally, a student recording in the locker room is cause for suspension, but in this case, the boys were the ones who got recorded, and nothing happened to the recorder because she is special. She has reportedly resumed using female restrooms, because of course she has. The community is outraged. The board is unyielding. They do not want to change.
Predictably, new outrages continue. According to a letter from the Defense of Freedom Institute to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, “on September 2, 2025, a 14-year-old girl entered the girls’ locker room at West Springfield High School and changed into clothes for gym class, but as she was leaving the locker room, the girl encountered a male student who has ‘facial hair’ and was ‘wearing pants that were so tight they clearly outlined his genitalia’ standing inside the girls’ locker room and watching the girls preparing for P.E. class.”
Then it happened again. On the same day that Charlie Kirk was killed, and again the next day, “DFI says the girl was upset by the boy’s presence in the locker room, where she had just changed, and other girls were in various stages of undress as they prepared for their required gym class.” The boy has since been observed using the boys’ locker room. Because of course he has.
DFI says that when the girl told a teacher that there was a boy in the girls’ locker room, the “teacher told her daughter there was nothing that teacher could do about the boy’s intruding into the private facility reserved for females and watching girls as they changed.”
Something has clearly snapped in Virginia. When Mr. Cox asked the grand jury judge to use preferred pronouns, his honor declined. Strangely, the usual suspects did not express their dismay at this literal genocide of Mr. Cox’s alleged transgenderness. Perhaps they do not want to associate ‘the civil rights cause of the 21st century’ with his Tier III convicted sex offender status, which is applied to sexual crimes against minors under the age of 13.
Home to 147,000 federal workers affected by the current government shutdown, northern Virginia is one of the bluest areas in the nation. The culture is moving on from ‘transgender’ everything, yet Fairfax County’s board is still standing by their “inclusion” policy. It is the proverbial millstone around the neck of Virginia Democrats, for they refuse to change.
As a result, the Democrat running for governor in Virginia is stuck in denial, defending the indefensible, while her Republican opponent hammers away at her relentlessly with her own voting record, with her own words. The contrast could not be clearer and it is defining the race, whatever the outcome. A brief candidate comparison follows.
On September 26, just as the polls explained below were about to be taken, Winsome Earle-Sears showed up in Fairfax County and held a press conference outside the school board meeting. Sears called the transgender access policy “ridiculousness”, a set of “unsafe measures” that violate Title IX. Sears blasted the media for letting Abigail Spangerger “get away with a word salad where she says a whole bunch of nothing”, never saying a clear “yes” or “no” about her voting record against the rights of parents.
Spanberger does not want parents to know about violence in school, or transgender identification in their children, Sears said, and “that’s not love.” Virginia is for lovers: the state motto. The candidates are fighting over the motto: love. Sears is with parents who love their children, while Spanberger loves the policy that lets Richard Cox in the locker room with their children.
Sears does not love the school administrators who have their own restrooms and locker rooms and foist the cost of their luxury beliefs off on students. She loves privacy for everyone and the high social trust that accompanies clear social boundaries. Sears loves to fight on this issue. Agree or disagree, voters prefer strength. They prefer a fighter. “You cannot be cowardly on this issue,” she says. Really, an ideal candidate is never cowardly; they are always plain-spoken.
Democrat Abigail Spanberger, on the other hand, is earnestly avoiding the issue, projecting weakness, which voters despise. Put to the question, she spergs forth word salad on the subject of Richard Cox and his transgender access pass, just as Earle-Sears notes. Spanberger did it again when she was asked about the DFI story. Behold the abyss:
The circumstance as this legal case plays out is really one of we’ve had court cases settled or judged here in Virginia in the fourth district, the former Gavin Grimm case related to bathroom usage. And in fact, the argument is the assessment is there needs to be much clearer guidance in terms of what is an executive order’s binding assessment of Title IX versus what has been a decision of a court. But ultimately, the real impact here is, once again, it is the Trump administration taking dollars away from Virginia. Threatening education dollars to our public schools is an attack on Virginia’s kids. It’s an attack on our economy. It’s an attack on Virginians. And as governor, the important thing is, as a candidate for governor, the important thing, the important priority for me is to ensure that we have the best public schools in the entire country. And the reality is, when we have a president who is coming after Virginia, our education system, whether it’s K-12 or whether it is our public universities that is harmful to Virginia, our ability to educate our kids and ultimately our economy.
Her staffers prevented ABC 7 reporter Nick Minock from following up the question, because of course they did. Turning to friendlier outlets, Spanberger wants to breathlessly “recognize” that people are concerned about boys cheating at girls’ sports and hanging out in their locker rooms, but she also wants to stick by the tried-and-true method of “local” control by “communities” where such policy has been captured, so that as many boys as possible can be encouraged to cheat at girls’ sports and hang out in girls’ locker rooms for as long as possible, preferably until hell freezes over.
In these interviews, Spanberger attempts to elicit empathy for the “individual circumstances” of boys cheating at girls’ sports and hanging out in girls’ locker rooms. Can’t we all just get along and keep doing the policy that genderwoo activists captured ten years ago? It was all working so well for special boys who want to cheat at girls’ sports, and boys in skirts who enjoy raping girls in restrooms, and creepy men who enjoy hanging out naked in female public school locker rooms. What’s the harm?
There is a truism in politics that if you are explaining, you are losing. The more Abigail Spanberger explains her position on this issue, the more she stands to lose, so of course she would rather dismiss it and talk about the economy.
Sears on the other hand is not a natural public speaker, nor has she been shined to a finish by focus groups and coaches, like Spanberger. Sears is an angry grandmother speaking her mind, with occasional stumbles and struggles. Yet these characteristics, which would be considered flaws in the old media format of elections campaigning, now serve to make her authentic. Authenticity is the magic stuff that gives ‘influencers’ their social media clout, these days. When her digital ads say these things, people believe that she believes them:
Abigail Spanberger is hiding from voters because she’s sold out to extremist nonsense. You have my word I will always stand with you and with common sense. She is for nonsense and I am for common sense.
Abigail Spanberger thinks it’s ok for nude men to use the girls’ locker rooms. That is not normal.
Abigail Spanberger thinks the state should raise our kids — hiding curriculum, covering up violence, even helping kids transition without mom or dad knowing. As a mom, I know parents aren’t the problem — they are the answer.
Inside the Fairfax school board meeting in September, Sears let loose. “It’s dangerous, it’s insane, and it has to stop,” she said. “Here’s the truth. There are two sexes, boys and girls, and for generations who understood this, they deserve their own sports teams, their own locker rooms, their own bathrooms. That’s not discrimination. It’s common sense.” Her full two minute speech could have been written by any TERF in the last decade: “As Governor, I will not stand by while political correctness tramples over science, fairness, and safety.” Sears sounds completely normal, a median American, whereas the ‘inclusion’ policy in Arlington and four other Virginia counties is inexplicable and indefensible to normal, median Americans.
Hammering the point home, the Sears campaign has poured digital ad dollars into spots modeled on Donald Trump’s “They/Them” ads of 2024, which were the most successful of the entire election cycle. Despite earnest efforts to downplay their impact, the ads had a discernible effect, making Kamala Harris less acceptable to independents and young men, especially Black and Latino men.
Democrats believe they have the independent vote locked up in Virginia, that “independent” voters don’t care about transgender issues, and this may be true insofar as one defines the word ‘independent’. A radical communist would likely call themselves an independent; so might an ideological conservative who thinks the GOP is too liberal. Negative political ads work if they resonate with the ‘normie’, or low-engagement, voter to reduce their favorability towards the opponent. We shall see whose theory of the case is strongest.
Now let us discuss the state of the surveys in the state for lovers. It is not great, unfortunately. State-level races do not receive the same level of polling attention or survey quality as presidential races.
The Polling Is All Over the Map. A Campus Map
We have two comparable recent polls using two slightly different methodologies, which is important to understanding the difference (‘delta’) between their results. Of course, all polls are merely snapshots of opinion, but we have enough information over enough time to rough out a hypothesis.
During the last week of September, the A2 Insights Virginia Poll reported that Sears was behind Spanberger by 3 points, almost the margin of error. This is a new firm that appears to be independent. As noted below, this would be quite an improvement of 14 points compared to another survey in May by a different polling entity, illustrating the range of values making all these results uncertain.
This A2 Insights poll has been cast as an outlier. As one might expect, Sears’ supporters skew male, conservative, and less educated, while youth voters skew towards Spanberger, which is hardly surprising. By one metric — the comparative ratio of references to “constitution” and “social justice” in course catalogs — the three most ‘woke’ campuses in Virginia collectively enroll 60,000 students.
Another of the most woke campuses in Virginia, a place notorious for oppressive atmosphere, is Emerson College. In a poll with a similar sample size taken right after the A2 Insights poll, Emerson found Spanberger ahead by 10 points. The A2 Insights sample was slightly whiter, but otherwise comparable in demographics. Geography was the main difference. Various media outlets are framing the Emerson survey as an improvement for Spanberger, but I remain skeptical.
There is a discernible gap between collegiate polling and private polling. Last week, Trafalgar Group — which had some of the most accurate state-level surveys in 2024 — published a poll with higher sample sizes than either the A2 Insights or the Emerson poll. Using their “unorthodox” methodology, Trafalgar found Spanberger ahead of Sears by just 5.2 points.
Six weeks ago in August, Roanoke College — also considered quite “inclusive”, especially where male collegiate swimmers are involved — showed Spanberger with a 7 point lead, which is the current polling average. It was an amazing improvement since the previous Roanoke poll in May, which had given Spanberger a 17 point lead. Dr. Bromley-Trujillo, a political science professor at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, cautioned that Democrats were surprised before in 2021 by discounting the effect of ‘culture war’ campaigning on unlikely voters, and that it had happened again in 2024, and might be happening again now.
This improvement was widely interpreted as Trump voters “coming home” to Sears, but between May and mid-August, Richard Cox was a top news item in Virginia. More to the mathematical point, Emerson appears to weight their results by region. Political geography matters, and matters most when politics are changing. It is also worth noting that all of these polls measure “likely voters”, defined by every pollster as people who voted in 2024. Thus the polling will not capture ‘freshman voters’ — people voting for the first time, perhaps because of Charlie Kirk, or because of Trump.
New registration statistics are not available, and Virginia does not register by party anyway, but there is one campus organization that is registering new voters as fast as they can: Turning Point. The Charlie Kirk effect is already discernible. What Democrats dismiss as “culture war” is being perceived in the boonies of Virginia as an actual, shooting war against themselves. Sensing Spanberger as a threat, the normally-disengaged voter can be mobilized: this is the working theory of the Sears campaign.
Democrats, on the other hand, seem to have collectively entered a zero-sum mindset of voter mobilization. “Most polls showed us still stuck in a virtual dead heat” three days out, Kamala Harris writes in her risible election memoir. “In six of the seven swing states, polls had Trump and me within a point of each other, me with the slightest of advantages in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan; Trump with a similar razor-thin margin in Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina.” Set aside the fact that this is a very generous reading of the polling at the time: these surveys were all based on “likely voters”, the kind that Harris was focused on motivating.
Contrarily, the Donald Trump campaign chose to mobilize the low-engagement voter that Sears is now targeting. Tim Saler and James Blair in particular “thought the [Trump] campaign’s money would be better spent motivating infrequent voters who, if they showed up, would definitely vote for Trump”, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Tyler Pager write in their own book on the 2024 election. Rather than a traditional, expensive get-out-the-vote campaign, “Trump Force 47” worked like “a multilevel marketing scheme.”
The campaign would recruit volunteers in battleground areas and assign them each twenty-five neighbors who, based on demographics and consumer data, looked like Trump supporters but didn’t reliably vote. Volunteers who completed their mission by converting ten of those twenty-five neighbors received a new list of fifty. Those who recruited twenty-five out of fifty received their next-level challenge: forty-seven out of a list of one hundred. Blair’s confidence in the strength of this system and the accuracy of the campaign’s data targeting withstood months of grousing from local-level Republican Party officials that they saw none of the usual signs of office openings and door knocking.
Frankly, having observed the close correlation between MLMs and conservative politics over the years, it is a wonder to me that this innovation took so long to get recognized. It is literally how the John Birch Society and the grassroots Tea Party movement happened. Political historians need to mark the 2024 election as the moment when ‘traditional’ GOTV models — the mobilizing activities that Democrats outsourced to their nonprofits many years ago — were proven less efficient at actually getting out the vote than the Amway model of organization.
Turning Point operates on the same basic software, by the way. And just who are these new voters that such organizing seems to work on most? Why, they live in the redder, whiter, more rural areas that elected Youngkin in 2021: the kind of places J.D. Vance writes about in Hillbilly Elegy, places where people adore Pete Hegseth. Flyover country. Bumpkins and rubes, to coastal elites. Demoralized by decades of Washington consensus, these voters are normally difficult to mobilize. It can be done, though. After all, Trump has them waving his flags and wearing his hats.
While all of this has been happening, the results of early voting were being ‘baked in’ since 23 September — and the early voting numbers are roughly double what they were in 2024. Both sides are focused on early voting. Both sides claim to be highly motivated. Charlie Kirk’s assassin’s transgender boyfriend has meanwhile upended the narratives of transgenderism and violence, finally punching through into public consciousness after a series of horrific headlines: the Covenant school shooting in Nashville, the Zizians death cult, and most recently, the man who tried to kill Brett Kavanaugh.
Normally, someone who flies to Washington, DC with a suitcase full of weapons and attempts to murder Supreme Court justices over their disagreeable legal opinions is called ‘a terrorist’ and receives a sentence of 30 years in federal penitentiaries. But Nicholas John Roske, the man arrested outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home, is special because he has claimed a sacred transgender identity. So last week, Judge Deborah Boardman, a Biden appointee, sentenced “Ms. Roske” to just 8 years in prison. This sort of exceptionalism is exactly what annoys the public most about transgender ‘identity’; it is what makes “They/Them” ads so darned effective. Sears will use it it in her ads.
For the first time, there is also an organization (Turning Point) with a massive potential voter base and a mobilization apparatus (churches, volunteers, funding, etc.), attuned to the threat of transgender violence, in an environment of total public awareness of abundant and exquisite examples of two-tier justice for the violent left. Never has the issue been so salient to so many. The only question is how many, and the Republican candidate seems to be convinced there are many such Virginia voters who can be mobilized by this galvanizing issue.
Which is why we all need to keep an eye on the Virginia governor’s race. It is giving us the best and purest test so far of what the electoral impact of transgender issues really is, right now. Virginia is deeply blue, and those federal employees are very anxious because of the federal government shutdown, so let us not be Pollyanna about our expectations. Still, the cultural backlash to ‘trans inclusion’ and associated violence is finally getting measured in polling results. We are emerging as a class of voter. Apologies to all while I untangle some political science threads.
How The Intervening Variables Will Intervene
By far, the number one issue cited by voters is the economy. Democrats use this to argue that transgender issues are meaningless ‘culture war’ distractions from greedy oligarchs ripping you off. They are both the party of the working class and also the party that rewrites the rules to empower pedophiles, rapists, tresspassers, and sports cheats in public schools with working class students. This is the current fashion in luxury beliefs held sacred by the American administrative and academic classes, which are strongly represented in Virginia.
As an organization, the entire Democratic party — electeds, rank and file, activists, donors, etc. — has convinced itself that regular people will listen to them about ‘kitchen table issues’ when their son is sitting at the kitchen table doing his in-home suspension homework for the crime of knowing what a girl is, or while their daughter’s grades are slipping as she struggles to recover from restroom trauma because there are no single-sex rape crisis support services, since boys in skirts are special.
Democrats also bet big on threats to abortion access to lift Kamala Harris to victory in 2024. They are doing it again in Virginia right now. Democrats are the party that wants to represent the human rights of women and also pretend they don’t know what an adult human female is, let alone protect girls from finding out what adult human men look like naked. Worse for Democrats, a Christopher Newport University poll in September found that only 4 percent of Virginia voters say they will make reproductive rights their top issue in November.
Keep that number in mind: four percent. “On the topic of transgender issues, a majority (31%) of those polled said it was “not important at all”, reads the Emerson poll. Which is a neat way of avoiding the shadow demographic of ~69 percent who apparently feel it is important to some degree. Emerson further insists that only 4 percent of voters say that female sports are their number one issue, making ‘gender critical’ views at least as salient with Virginia voters as abortion!
The execrable propagandist Erin Reed spins this data as proof nobody cares about women’s sports or single-sex spaces. He has a new Christopher Newport University poll which helpfully shows that no one cares about transgender issues. What ought to dismay Democrats still capable of rubbing brain cells together is that just four years ago, zero voters said this was their most important issue, and that four or five points is the margin of error in most Virginia election polls.
Democrats are clearly smoking some amount of Erin Reed’s copium instead of confronting their addiction to drag kids. According to the bipartisan nonprofit Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), at the time of this writing, early ballot collection since 23 September 2025 is almost double the total at this point in 2024. Their map of results shows that early voting turnout is very high in Republican bastions, accounting for nearly half of all the early ballots.
As I have noted, Emerson College Polling weights the districts that favor Spanberger. Like magic, their survey reports that Spanberger leads early vote reporting 50-38 percent among their respondents. They furthermore report that voters who have not cast a ballot favor Spanberger 50-43 percent. “51% have a favorable view of Spanberger”, they say.
Getting high on your own supply is a bad habit among Democrats these days. On the other side of this very question is Impact Social, a media research company that recently shared their own results with Newsweek. Online, Spanberger sentiment is in the toilet, they say. In fact, they warn that Democrats “risk losing” the Virginia election if they do not shift their strategy. While they surveyed political expression and sentiment rather than voters, the results were notable.
Impact Social analyzed social media discussion about each candidate in the race, which revealed that Spanberger has a net sentiment of -28, while Earle-Sears’ sentiment is +18. The discrepancy is because the left is “venting against Trump while failing to support the Democratic candidate or attack their opponent,” according to the report.
“Relying on Trump as a mobilizing foil can only go so far. If Democrats cannot channel that oppositional energy into genuine support for their own candidates they risk losing these contests,” the report reads.
Overall, Americans prefer problem-solving to partisanship. This was the secret sauce of Donald Trump in 2016: he appealed most of all to the voters most disaffected from, and disappointed by, the Republican Party. MAGA still see him as someone who can fix everything. But elected Democrats refuse to compromise with Trump on anything, least of all this. They shut down the government for reasons that regular, normal, workaday American voters find utterly noxious, because Trump, because that is what the blue northern Virginia and campus leftist and professional activist Democratic base demands.
The Charlie Kirk effect, and the gut-punch motivating power of the ‘trans inclusion’ issue, will give us the best and purest test so far of what the electoral impact of our issue space is going to be. In such a febrile environment, expect new controversies.
Over the weekend, a new scandal drew even more attention to left-wing violence. Jerrauld Charles Corey “Jay” Jones, the Democratic nominee for Attorney General in Virginia, told a Republican colleague about his fantasy of murdering a Republican legislator and his children. Jones not only sent now-former Del. Carrie Coyner disturbing text messages, he called her afterwards to repeat what he had said in them about “pain” being necessary for change to happen, a point which he then repeated in a text message.
In 2022, “Jay Jones wished violence on the children of a colleague and joked about shooting Todd Gilbert”, Coyner said in a statement. “It’s disgusting and unbecoming of any public official.” Jones was convicted of reckless driving the same year. According to the court, he was going 116 m.p.h. in a 70 m.p.h. zone, because Jay Jones was an impulsive young man in his (checks notes) early thirties. His ‘community service’ appears to have been fraudulent. Jones is running for state attorney general.
Speaking of young liberal men with poor impulse control, here, at last, is a chart:
Sears is hitting at her opponent with ads about Jay Jones. Every new detail becomes a tweet. “Abigail Spanberger is standing by Jay Jones after he was exposed for saying ‘maybe if a few cops died, they’d stop shooting people’,” Sears says. “All this AFTER he fantasized about murdering a dad and his two kids.”
Following the Charlie Kirk assassination, Spanberger said that she watches the news and lets the resulting “rage” fuel her. Sears will not stop talking about that. “Every day Abigail Spanberger stays silent, she legitimizes Jay Jones’ fantasy about murdering a father and his two children,” Sears says: “Her rage politics are dangerous, cowardly, and everything Virginia isn’t.” Because Virginia is for lovers. The candidates will face off tomorrow night in the season’s only debate.
Again, as I write these words, the results of this hot campaign are being baked into the early ballot results that will only be known on the evening of 4 November 2025. Conservative and moderate voters are unhappy about civil disorder, interpersonal political violence, and propagandistic excuses for pedophiles and skirted rapists. They are likely to vote their frustrations, whereas the angry, radicalized males in extended adolescence who populate ‘the left’ are more likely to act out.
Opposition to transgenderism seems to stimulate tremendous ego-dystonic arousal in the ‘affirming’ population. More words or acts of violence, whether or not they come wrapped in a transgender flag, are likely to keep the sense of threat very high among what would normally be low-engagement Virginia voters. It is a febrile time. People have a heightened sense of danger — and the edge of the abyss has motivating power.
Virginia Democrats seem unperturbed. None of them has un-endorsed Jay Jones. They are the same Democrats who remain unyielding on ‘trans inclusion’ in public school facilities, and everyone seems to get that connection except Democrats.
The Real Story Will Be In The ‘Delta’
That chart above shows a ‘delta’, a discernible, therefore meaningful, difference. Looking towards the 2026 midterms, when Democrats hope to claw back a measure of power in Washington, it will matter what the final result in Virginia is, even if Winsome Earle-Sears does not win. The diverging trendlines of this conventional wisdom and the final outcome — the delta — will get all the attention.
If the Beltway-insider wisdom of the odd anonymous “GOP strategist” and the ivory tower academics are correct, then Sears will lose by double digits. To use a sports betting analogy, Vegas has Spanberger +7 and the Emerson make-a-wish poll has Spanberger +10. This leaves a dangerous amount of room for Sears to overperform. It also indicates just how partisan Virginia Democrats are, compared to everyone else.
In the unlikely event that Sears does actually win — it is an uphill challenge — then anguish will reach apocalyptic levels on the American left. Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehasi Coates will have to accept they are on the wrong side of a supermajority regarding these issues, that their marginal morality does not turn out voters. It repels voters, and increasingly mobilizes them against Democrats.
If Abigail Spanberger wins by a whisker, many more Democrats will remain stuck in the denial stage of grief for ‘gender identity’ as a civil rights project, but the writing will be undeniably on the wall. New voices will start asking questions about Democratic candidates blowing double-digit leads to Republican opponents. Thus the final margin — Spanberger +1 or +2, versus +5 — matters. It describes the salience of our issue as an emerging, growing electoral force, even in a place where genderwoo has maximum social and political power.
If you want to follow my analysis of the Virginia gubernatorial race, I am posting regular updates for premium subscribers at The Distance Mag. I am not promising a Virginia miracle. I do expect Sears to outperform the expectations of Democrats, likely even scare a bit of sense into some of them. Alternately, Virginia Democrats may just show us how immune to facts and rationality and lost to humanity they really are. Halloween is nigh. I will be watching the delta.
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Great piece. I'm watching the debate now. Unfortunately Earle-Sears isn't doing herself any favors by constantly interrupting Spanberger, who is a pro at remaining cool and making her points.