Free Republic

Virginia is one of two states holding regularly scheduled state legislative elections in 2025, making it one of the most watched “off-year” elections leading up to midterms next year. Voters will select all 100 members of the House of Delegates Tuesday, as well as the governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. Party control of the House especially will set the course of the battle for life in the largest southeastern state that has not enacted protections for unborn babies and mothers in the law after Dobbs – determining whether a proposal to enshrine third-trimester abortion and eliminate the rights of...

We are tracking who is casting ballots ahead of Election Day for the mayor’s race in New York City and governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia. Here, we are comparing voters who have cast ballots so far with the makeup of the early and overall electorate in the 2024 presidential election. One of the most closely watched metrics in New York this year is age. Since the city’s mayoral elections are held in off years (without a presidential election on the ballot), the electorate tends to be much smaller. And it skews older than in presidential elections, since older...

Paramedics rushed to save a Virginia elementary teacher's life after she was shot in her classroom by a six-year-old student, newly released body camera footage shows. Abby Zwerner was shot in the hand and chest in January 2023 as she sat at a reading table in her classroom at Richneck Elementary School. Distressing police body camera footage presented to the jury Wednesday showed Zwerner lying on the floor as first responders applied gauze and pressure to the bloody gunshot wound on her upper chest, near her left shoulder. The first-grade teacher, whose face was pale and displayed a pained expression,...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA – Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears‘s campaign is having to carry on without her, with less than one week before Election Day, after Democrats’ surprise redistricting move called her back to Richmond.The move from Democrats, the latest in a string of redistricting efforts from both parties, set off a wave of Republican outrage and confusion among voters gathered to see her at a campaign stop in the central part of the state. At a coffee shop in Charlottesville, where Earle-Sears had been scheduled to campaign Tuesday afternoon, her husband Terence Sears took the stage in her place, joined...

A 24-year-old Honduran man who was fleeing federal immigration agents in Virginia died on a highway after being struck by a vehicle. The death of Josué Castro Rivera follows recent incidents in which three other immigrants in Chicago and California were killed during immigration enforcement operations under the Trump administration’s crackdown. Castro Rivera was headed to a gardening job Thursday when his vehicle was pulled over by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, brother Henry Castro said. Agents tried to detain Castro Rivera and the three other passengers, and he fled on foot, tried to cross Interstate 264 in Norfolk and...

The man who went viral for lobbing racially charged insults at Virginia gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears during a college football game earlier this month, subsequently filed a police report claiming he was getting harassed after the incident went viral. The Fairfax County Police Department confirmed to Fox News Digital that it was aware of the police report that was filed and that, ultimately, the department's threat assessment unit found that the information provided did not meet the criteria for a criminal investigation. "Go back to Haiti!," the man from the viral video yelled at Sears, a Republican, during a James...

Republican Winsome Sears, a staunch pro-life advocate, is locked in a tightening race against pro-abortion Rep. Abigail Spanberger for Virginia governor as Election Day on Nov. 5 approaches. Recent polls are showing the contest narrowing amid fierce debates over protecting unborn children from abortion up to birth. Pro-life leaders are rallying behind Sears, warning that a Spanberger victory could enshrine unlimited abortions in the state constitution, devastating thousands of babies and devaluing human life. The race has drawn national attention as Virginia’s off-year election serves as an early barometer for 2026 congressional battles, with Sears positioning herself as a defender...

The plan follows Republicans in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina who have redrawn congressional maps to help the GOP gain more House seats in next year's midterms. Virginia Democrats are planning to attempt to redistrict the commonwealth's congressional maps to help their party ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.Don Scott, the leader of the state's Democrat-controlled House, wrote in a letter to colleagues Thursday stating the chamber will reopen an existing special legislative session Monday afternoon, NBC News reported. Legislators are expected to use the session to start the effort to draw new maps.In Virginia, only the governor can convene...

One of the many problems facing Jay Jones' campaign this month has been a story about reckless driving. Back in 2022 Jones went driving on the I-64 freeway east of Richmond, VA and got pulled over for speeding. The speed limit on this stretch of freeway is 70 mph. Jones was caught driving 116 mph, which works out to 46 mph over the limit. Any speed more than 20 mph over the limit is automatically classified as reckless driving and usually results in more than a fine. But not for Jay Jones. He got a sweetheart deal from the court.If...

"The stakes couldn't be higher," Jay Jones, the Virginia Democrat running for state attorney general, said Monday in an X post. It was an ironic post, coming 10 days after National Review reported numerous violent text messages Jones sent to a colleague in the legislature about a Republican lawmaker. Jones fantasized about urinating on the graves of political opponents as well as shooting then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert with "two bullets to the head." He also texted that he hoped Gilbert's wife, Jennifer, would one day hold one of her children as they died. He followed that post with the...

Gubernatorial candidate voted against Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act Abigail Spanberger, the Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate, really wants voters to know she has three daughters, and that should scare every Virginia mother and father straight to the polls. The girl mom crosses her heart that she’ll put families first, even though she refuses to pull her endorsement from attorney general candidate Jay Jones, who dreamed of putting bullets in a former Virginia House speaker and watching his children die. Maybe she isn’t talking about putting the speaker’s family first. SPANBERGER QUIET ON TWIN CONTROVERSIES IN FINAL STRETCH...

Former President Obama will campaign with Democratic Virginia gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger in Norfolk, Va., on Nov. 1, according to a Tuesday announcement from Spanberger’s campaign.Obama last campaigned in Hampton Roads in 2012. His upcoming campaign stop with Spanberger will mark the first campaign visit of any Democratic president to the area in over 10 years. The announcement comes less than a week after Obama cut two ads urging Virginia voters to back Spanberger in next month’s governor’s race.

Virginia Republicans scored a monumental victory in 2021. After 12 years of sustained statewide losses, the party emerged from the wilderness and swept the three statewide races that year, led by outsider Glenn Youngkin, who became the commonwealth’s first Republican governor since Bob McDonnell left office in 2014.Virginia’s gubernatorial elections are unique in American politics in that no other state makes its governor a lame duck the moment he is sworn in, as term limits prohibit consecutive terms. No Virginia governor has ever run for reelection as an incumbent, although two governors have succeeded in winning nonconsecutive terms.The commonwealth’s proximity...

VIDEO

Was it only weeks ago in mid-September that I wrote a column about Democrats embracing the assassination culture that took the life of young Christian evangelist Charlie Kirk? And now in Virginia they’re doubling down. Virginia Democrats are endorsing the murderous candidacy of Jay Jones, who comes from a prominent black Virginia Democrat family. You see Jones in the photograph above, applauding the Democrat candidate for governor, former U.S. Rep Abigail Spanberger. You’ve heard of Jones and his dark fantasies over texts to a colleague, seeking the murders of his Republican opponents. And their children. Yes, their kids who he...

Jeffrey Epstein’s former Upper East Side mansion has undergone a massive, million-dollar remodel in an attempt to scrub all traces of the pedophile financier and his twisted sex crimes, The Post can reveal. But a new memoir from Epstein’s late victim Virginia Giuffre has dragged 9 E. 71st St. — once New York City’s largest private home — back into the grim spotlight. In “Nobody’s Girl,” which was released this week, Giuffre describes being repeatedly subjected to sado-masochistic sexual torture in a massage room that she named “The Dungeon.” Giuffre describes being chained up, fitted with a collar, and beaten...

This story isn’t complicated. A teenage girl in Fairfax County became pregnant, her guardian told the school, and days later she was bleeding and terrified—no one from the school had called, no consent was sought, and the guardian learned she was no longer pregnant only when doctors in the ER told him. FCPS insists it ran a “comprehensive investigation,” but this newly surfaced recording proves they either never found or never wanted to find the truth. It obliterates the official narrative that whistleblower Zenaida Perez fabricated evidence and shows exactly what the district tried to bury: a frightened minor, a...

Jackie Norris, the chairwoman of the Des Moines Public School Board who once served as chief of staff to Michelle Obama, has pulled out of the race for Iowa's open U.S. Senate seat as recommended by her Republican opponent, Rep. Ashley Hinson. Hinson stressed earlier this month that Norris, a champion of DEI, had "lost all shreds of credibility" over the role she played in the hiring of the Des Moines district's former superintendent, a criminal illegal alien who was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Sept 26. Ian Andre Roberts, a native of Guyana, has a lengthy...

Campaign ads for Democrats Mikie Sherrill, top, and Abigail Spanberger, link their Republican opponents to President Trump.Credit...From top: Greater Garden State, Spanberger for VA GovernorIn New Jersey, Virginia and beyond, voters have been inundated with ads linking Republican candidates to the president. Some Democratic strategists see a missed opportunity to forge a more positive message.Campaign ads for Democrats Mikie Sherrill, top, and Abigail Spanberger, link their Republican opponents to President Trump.Credit...From top: Greater Garden State, Spanberger for VA GovernorIn New Jersey, the most expensive attack ad in the governor’s race so far this fall accuses the Republican nominee, Jack Ciattarelli,...

Jay Jones gave speech condemning Ralph Northam’s blackface controvery, then campaigned with him. Democratic Virginia attorney general hopeful Jay Jones gave an impassioned speech on race in 2019 which criticized then-Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam over wearing blackface — and then Jones embraced and campaigned with the disgraced Democratic governor during his unsuccessful bid to be attorney general in 2021 and again during his current bid in 2025.The yearbook photo depicting two people, one dressed up in Ku Klux Klan robes and the other in blackface, appeared on Northam’s 1984 yearbook page at Eastern Virginia Medical School and came to...