Frankly, driving 116mph shows a complete disregard for the safety of others, and a willingness to risk the lives of the people he’s supposed to represent. That seems at least as bad as the texts to me.
I'm pleasantly surprised that at least some of my peers on the Left consider these texts disqualifying. It had sorta seemed to me like we were in a, 'no matter how bad our side is, they are worse' mode.
I consider it disqualifying. The country doesn't get out of this horrifying political morass without getting back to consistent basic principles. Someone shouldn't get a pass because they're on "my side". And people need to think about a movement that's more than one election, but think in terms of a decades long movement. And beyond one party.
I care less about what exactly constitutes a "scandal", and more about the fact that the candidate has, through his actions, demonstrated himself to be an idiot. We should not elect idiots. I think it sometimes makes sense to elect people who once privately said something regrettable. But... said it _recently_? And to a political opponent?? That demonstrates a profound lack of judgement. And 115 mph speeding... again, if it had been a regrettable one-time mistake from his distant past (if nobody was hurt), sure, maybe. But three years ago, as an adult? And he's also credibly accused of cheating his community service hours? And he's running for _Attorney General_???? No, man, fuck off.
If scandals mattered, then Trump wouldn’t be President. The premise is ridiculous because of the election of a sexual predator political neophyte and pathological liar and the re-election of him post inciting an insurrection and then he goes on to pardon the insurrectionists who beat up cops and then some who went on to commit new crimes. So, no scandals don’t matter. The parties aren’t the same in the least bit, how any rational person could support the Republicans let alone ask the question if scandals matter in 2025 is beyond any realm of rationality.
The texting scandal isn't amounting to a great deal because that behavior has been normalized by Trump and by proxy all of the GOP. He just held a press conference bragging about killing people. And to be clear, it's very likely that some of those people were, and are going to be, victims of trafficking.
As someone who lives in Richmond and has many D leaning friends, I can tell you they don't care about the Jay Jones stuff. They just want to vote against Republicans. But obviously progressive millenials/gen Z in Richmond are a more unique voter class.
Mayhe I am showing my bias here, but it seems like Jones is referencing a joke from The Office here when michael talks about shooting Toby twice. The child comment is intense (to put it mildly), but the three people two bullets one seems like a stretch.
This was 100% my thought. The elevator joke is a dumb joke. But I have heard it before. To me, the only conclusion I would draw from that is questioning Jay Jones' fitness for office if he thinks that is a good idea to text to an opposing party legislator. That's straight up poor judgment.
The comment on the children is a different beast altogether. There is no justification for wishing someone's kids die in their arms so they switch policy positions.
I wonder if the Redistricting push will helps Jones with some of those would-be undervotes. I don’t live in VA, but am solidly left. I found myself (to my surprise) rooting for Miyares for a few weeks after the texts, but now I find I do hope Jones wins in light of the push (which Miyares could obstruct). I’d still want him to just serve his term then disappear forever, and automatically support any legitimate primary challenge against him in 2029 if he tries to run again, but now I feel the stakes are high enough I would resist the nausea and vote for him in spite of those heinous texts.
The 0.83 correlation of Spanberger and Jones margin among polls is not the relevant statistic for guessing how Spanberger's election margin will correlate with Jones' among the potential future scenarios.
There are three types of voters: straight-ticket Democrats, straight-ticket Republicans and splitters (I'll ignore undecided, reverse splitters, will not vote, third party and other possibilities). To the extent the polls have random errors--just happening to call more straight-ticket Democrats than population frequency, respondents providing randomly inaccurate answers, random demographic adjustment errors)--there should be no correlation between errors in straight-ticket voters and errors in split-ticket voters.
This is in fact the case with Democratic straight-ticket voters and split-ticket voters. Among polls, support for Jones in the AG race--straight-ticket Democrats--had an 0.01, essentially zero, correlation with split ticket voters. So polls that picked up more straight-ticket Democrats had no tendency to pick up more or fewer split-ticket voters.
But polls that picked up more Earle-Sears voters in the governor's race--straight-ticket Republicans--picked up fewer split-ticket voters, with a negative 0.57 correlation. More relevant is the Beta--if your poll picked up 100 more Earle-Sears voters than other polls, it found 31 fewer split-ticket voters on average. Even more relevant is the t-statistic on that Beta, -2.2, which by convention is considered statistically significant. It's pretty implausible that the pro-Earle-Sears polls missed more split-ticket voters (or the pro-Spanberger polls picked up extra split-ticket voters) by random chance or other errors that could have gone either way.
Incidentally, these are not necessarily errors in polls, it could also reflect that polls were done at different times during which some voter intentions changed.
This suggests--although with only 12 polls and an oversimplified model this is only a weak suggestion--that Jones, whether due to the scandals or something else, is pulling down Spanberger. The more Democrats who decide to split, the greater the support for Spanberger, but not the more support for Miyares. In that case, a big margin for Spanberger could be bad news for Jones, costing him votes even if it doesn't add a lot of Miyares votes.
The election result is not going to be a random draw among polls conducted before the election, but a real, deterministic event. Nevertheless, if we thought all the polls were equally good simulations of the election with independent errors, and there were enough of them to cover the range of plausible outcomes, we could forecast the election by picking a poll at random. In that case we'd say Jones' fortunes are closely tied to Spanberger's margin of victory.
But the -0.57 correlation tells us the poll differences are not independent and therefore predicting the election by selecting at random from among the polls is a bad idea. Historical experience and common sense tell us that a landslide for government will help the party's AG candidate, but the differences among polls do not provide evidence for that.
Politics goes on across the land. In Lowell, MA, in the Preliminary (a Primary) three incumbents were challenged. One lost and two came in second. Keeps my attention up.
Shouldn't the corruption around the speeding tickets be a far bigger scandal than the texts, especially for an attorney general candidate?
Frankly, driving 116mph shows a complete disregard for the safety of others, and a willingness to risk the lives of the people he’s supposed to represent. That seems at least as bad as the texts to me.
I'm pleasantly surprised that at least some of my peers on the Left consider these texts disqualifying. It had sorta seemed to me like we were in a, 'no matter how bad our side is, they are worse' mode.
I consider it disqualifying. The country doesn't get out of this horrifying political morass without getting back to consistent basic principles. Someone shouldn't get a pass because they're on "my side". And people need to think about a movement that's more than one election, but think in terms of a decades long movement. And beyond one party.
Ideally we need to start getting back to 'does this people actually have the experience and skill to do a particular job'?
I care less about what exactly constitutes a "scandal", and more about the fact that the candidate has, through his actions, demonstrated himself to be an idiot. We should not elect idiots. I think it sometimes makes sense to elect people who once privately said something regrettable. But... said it _recently_? And to a political opponent?? That demonstrates a profound lack of judgement. And 115 mph speeding... again, if it had been a regrettable one-time mistake from his distant past (if nobody was hurt), sure, maybe. But three years ago, as an adult? And he's also credibly accused of cheating his community service hours? And he's running for _Attorney General_???? No, man, fuck off.
Yeah I still don't understand why he was borderline harassing/stalking a republican colleague with these texts...
Amen
Great article, Eli. Thank you
If scandals mattered, then Trump wouldn’t be President. The premise is ridiculous because of the election of a sexual predator political neophyte and pathological liar and the re-election of him post inciting an insurrection and then he goes on to pardon the insurrectionists who beat up cops and then some who went on to commit new crimes. So, no scandals don’t matter. The parties aren’t the same in the least bit, how any rational person could support the Republicans let alone ask the question if scandals matter in 2025 is beyond any realm of rationality.
The texting scandal isn't amounting to a great deal because that behavior has been normalized by Trump and by proxy all of the GOP. He just held a press conference bragging about killing people. And to be clear, it's very likely that some of those people were, and are going to be, victims of trafficking.
As someone who lives in Richmond and has many D leaning friends, I can tell you they don't care about the Jay Jones stuff. They just want to vote against Republicans. But obviously progressive millenials/gen Z in Richmond are a more unique voter class.
Mayhe I am showing my bias here, but it seems like Jones is referencing a joke from The Office here when michael talks about shooting Toby twice. The child comment is intense (to put it mildly), but the three people two bullets one seems like a stretch.
This was 100% my thought. The elevator joke is a dumb joke. But I have heard it before. To me, the only conclusion I would draw from that is questioning Jay Jones' fitness for office if he thinks that is a good idea to text to an opposing party legislator. That's straight up poor judgment.
The comment on the children is a different beast altogether. There is no justification for wishing someone's kids die in their arms so they switch policy positions.
Definitely agree the child stuff is far worse than the maybe-bad-joke.
So I'm interested in what happened in the primary. Primaries are supposed to help vet candidates.
When you look at it, the AG primary was close. What failed in the AG primary to vet Jones? What could have been done better to get a better candidate?
I wonder if the Redistricting push will helps Jones with some of those would-be undervotes. I don’t live in VA, but am solidly left. I found myself (to my surprise) rooting for Miyares for a few weeks after the texts, but now I find I do hope Jones wins in light of the push (which Miyares could obstruct). I’d still want him to just serve his term then disappear forever, and automatically support any legitimate primary challenge against him in 2029 if he tries to run again, but now I feel the stakes are high enough I would resist the nausea and vote for him in spite of those heinous texts.
The 0.83 correlation of Spanberger and Jones margin among polls is not the relevant statistic for guessing how Spanberger's election margin will correlate with Jones' among the potential future scenarios.
There are three types of voters: straight-ticket Democrats, straight-ticket Republicans and splitters (I'll ignore undecided, reverse splitters, will not vote, third party and other possibilities). To the extent the polls have random errors--just happening to call more straight-ticket Democrats than population frequency, respondents providing randomly inaccurate answers, random demographic adjustment errors)--there should be no correlation between errors in straight-ticket voters and errors in split-ticket voters.
This is in fact the case with Democratic straight-ticket voters and split-ticket voters. Among polls, support for Jones in the AG race--straight-ticket Democrats--had an 0.01, essentially zero, correlation with split ticket voters. So polls that picked up more straight-ticket Democrats had no tendency to pick up more or fewer split-ticket voters.
But polls that picked up more Earle-Sears voters in the governor's race--straight-ticket Republicans--picked up fewer split-ticket voters, with a negative 0.57 correlation. More relevant is the Beta--if your poll picked up 100 more Earle-Sears voters than other polls, it found 31 fewer split-ticket voters on average. Even more relevant is the t-statistic on that Beta, -2.2, which by convention is considered statistically significant. It's pretty implausible that the pro-Earle-Sears polls missed more split-ticket voters (or the pro-Spanberger polls picked up extra split-ticket voters) by random chance or other errors that could have gone either way.
Incidentally, these are not necessarily errors in polls, it could also reflect that polls were done at different times during which some voter intentions changed.
This suggests--although with only 12 polls and an oversimplified model this is only a weak suggestion--that Jones, whether due to the scandals or something else, is pulling down Spanberger. The more Democrats who decide to split, the greater the support for Spanberger, but not the more support for Miyares. In that case, a big margin for Spanberger could be bad news for Jones, costing him votes even if it doesn't add a lot of Miyares votes.
The election result is not going to be a random draw among polls conducted before the election, but a real, deterministic event. Nevertheless, if we thought all the polls were equally good simulations of the election with independent errors, and there were enough of them to cover the range of plausible outcomes, we could forecast the election by picking a poll at random. In that case we'd say Jones' fortunes are closely tied to Spanberger's margin of victory.
But the -0.57 correlation tells us the poll differences are not independent and therefore predicting the election by selecting at random from among the polls is a bad idea. Historical experience and common sense tell us that a landslide for government will help the party's AG candidate, but the differences among polls do not provide evidence for that.
Politics goes on across the land. In Lowell, MA, in the Preliminary (a Primary) three incumbents were challenged. One lost and two came in second. Keeps my attention up.
Cliff