Editorial
As of Tuesday morning – two weeks from the Nov. 4 election – 3,733 votes had been cast locally by 14.35 percent of registered voters in Rockbridge County, Buena Vista and Lexington. Because of early voting that began Sept. 19 in Virginia, the Nov. 4 election has been underway for more than four weeks. A lot has been happening in what has been a contentious election season, both locally and across the state.
We’ve had allegations of dark money being spent by mysterious, allegedly maleficent, entities who are trying to influence the two Rockbridge County Board of Supervisors races that are on the ballot this year. An out-of-state political action committee, Private Property Rights, has purportedly targeted 18 Board of Supervisors races across Virginia, including our two local ones, to support candidates who PPP apparently believes hold favorable views on large-scale solar energy projects.
The Concerned Citizens of Rockbridge County took out an ad in The News-Gazette a couple of weeks ago to call attention to PPP’s support for the two local candidates in question. Contacted by the newspaper, both candidates say they have neither solicited nor accepted PPP’s support.
As this election got under way last month, it appeared, according to polling, that the Democratic Party’s nominees of Abigail Spanberger for governor, Ghazala Hashmi for lieutenant governor and Jay Jones for attorney general might well sweep the top three state offices. Then came an Oct. 3 surprise – media reports that revealed Jones had sent text messages a few years ago in which he mused about shooting a Republican politician – upended the attorney general’s race.
Jones admitted he sent the texts and apologized for them but has declined the GOP’s demands that he withdraw from the race. Not surprisingly, Republicans have put a spotlight on the texts in their campaign ads, criticizing Jones’s ticket mates for not calling on him to exit the race, even though his ticket mates have made clear their disgust with the content of the texts.
The guess here is that the scandal will doom Jones’s candidacy and assure the reelection of Republican Attorney Gen. Jason Mayares. Whether the issue will drag down the entire Democratic ticket is uncertain. We’re awaiting new polling to see if the GOP candidacies of Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears for governor and John Reid for lieutenant governor are benefiting to any substantial degree from the fallout.
In Buena Vista, there’s a heated race between incumbent Mayor Tyson Cooper and challenger Jesse Lineberry. There’s a basic disagreement between the two on how the city is doing. Cooper believes the city is doing quite well and Lineberry does not. A couple of issues have crept into the campaign that could also affect the outcome – a proposal by Southern Virginia University to build a 600bed dormitory and the enactment of an ordinance last week to establish a cigarette tax in the city.
These are contentious times but we believe the local campaigns are evidence that democracy is alive and well in our community. All of the candidates at two recent forums acquitted themselves well, allowing their potential constituents to know where they stand on issues. We at the newspaper have attempted to further elucidate the views of candidates through profiles that we have published over the past several weeks.
Here’s hoping that voters take this knowledge and vote for their preferred candidates, either by casting ballots early or going to the polls on Election Day.
