Virginia AG passes on chance to replace Youngkin as next Republican governor

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said Monday he will run for reelection next year, quieting speculation that the commonwealth’s top prosecutor was weighing a bid to succeed Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

Mr. Miyares said in a video on X that he wants to build on a term that included driving the homicide rate down 30% since he took office and a 15% drop in deadly overdose deaths this year alone.

“We cannot allow Virginia to return to the dangerous policies of the past, where our law enforcement heroes were reviled, where criminals came first while victims came last,” Mr. Miyares said in the video. “We can’t return the failed policies of the past, because the safety of our families and the future of Virginia is at stake.”

There has been statewide speculation that Mr. Miyares would run as a Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2025. 

Governors cannot run for consecutive terms in Virginia, so Mr. Youngkin — the state’s first Republican governor voted into office since 2009 — will not be eligible for reelection.

Lieutenant Gov. Winsome Sears, also a Republican, launched her gubernatorial campaign in September. She is the only Republican to declare for a race that has seen Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, throw her hat in the ring.

Mr. Youngkin has endorsed both Ms. Sears and Mr. Miyares in both of their 2025 races.

Mr. Miyares served three terms as a House of Delegates representative in Virginia Beach before he, Ms. Sears and Mr. Youngkin swept the state’s top three offices in 2021.

Virginia’s appetite for change that year was spurred in part by lingering COVID-19 protocols, the rise of “critical race theory” lessons in state schools and the growing practice of allowing students to use the bathrooms of their self-identified gender.

A skirt-wearing male student in Loudoun County who sexually assaulted a girl inside a girl’s bathroom — an incident that was allegedly covered up by the local school system — sent parents into an uproar over the bathroom policy just weeks before the 2021 election.

After being elected as attorney general, Mr. Miyares brought charges and secured a conviction against Loudoun County schools’ former superintendent in connection to the case. A Virginia judge later overturned that conviction.

Mr. Miyares has sought to oust soft-on-crime prosecutors nationwide with his Protecting Americans Action Fund as well. He told the Washington Examiner this month that candidates his PAC supported won 12 out of the 14 races they had targeted.

The attorney general also successfully defended the commonwealth’s decision to purge about 1,600 noncitizens from state voter rolls.

Mr. Miyares will square off against former Norfolk-area Delegate Jay Jones, a Democrat, at the ballot box next year.

“Attorney General Miyares has failed us as Attorney General,” Mr. Jones wrote Monday on X. “Instead of protecting our families, he’s been a partisan warrior for his extremist agenda. And now he’s running for reelection to give Donald Trump a blank check. Next November, we will stop him.”

Mr. Miyares does have ties to President-elect Donald Trump. The attorney general’s former communications director, Victoria LaCivita, is the daughter of Chris LaCivita, who worked as Mr. Trump’s campaign co-chair. Ms. LaCivita left Mr. Miyares’ office to work for the Trump campaign in Michigan.

Mr. Miyares also has a relationship with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican. The attorney general worked as the Virginia co-chair for Mr. Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign and Mr. Rubio joined a fundraiser for Mr. Miyares in 2017.

Mr. Trump has named Mr. Rubio as his nominee for secretary of state.

— This article is based in part on wire service reports.