Virginia: Obama campaigned for the Democrat who fantasized about assassinating a Republican politician and his family

Barack Obama campaigned in Virginia for a candidate embroiled in a scandal of inciting violence against his opponents. It is Jay Jones, candidate for attorney general, who leaked a conversation in which he fantasized about the murder of a local Republican politician, Todd Gilbert, and his family. With the Old Dominion State election just days away, the former president also appeared with gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger, who faces Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears.

The campaign rally in which Obama participated was also attended by Spanberger and Jones, who addressed their supporters. During the event, which took place in Norfolk, Obama focused his attacks on Donald Trump and the White House. Particularly, he focused on the reduced payroll in the federal government, given that many of these former employees live in Virginia or Maryland.

"Hundreds of thousands of federal employees, including a lot of people here in Virginia, yeah. Have lost their jobs to pay for those billionaire tax cuts. We're talking about people who dedicated their lives to public service, who make the country work. Health insurance premiums for millions of people are about to double or even triple next year," he said.

In turn, he singled out the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, whom he officially endorsed in mid-October.

“And Abigail doesn’t just believe in working with everybody; she also believes—and this is really important—in listening to everybody, whether they voted for her or not. Because she knows that if we want to make progress on the things that we care about, we have to be able to disagree without calling each other nasty names or demonizing each other," the former president added.

"So at a time when our politics feels broken, we need desperately leaders like Abigail, public servants who are in it for the right reasons and are focused on the future," he added.

Spanberger, a former congresswoman with a past in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has led in every poll in recent months in her race against Sears. However, the current lieutenant governor has closed the gap after the debate. Therefore, despite polls showing the Democrat ahead, the Tuesday, Nov. 4, election could end up being competitive.

The national significance of the Virginia election

Along with New Jersey, this election is seen as the first real popularity test for a president (Trump), with even greater interest when it is the White House tenant's first year in office. This has been true particularly in Virginia, given its demographics and purple-state tradition, although in recent years the trend has been slightly Democratic.

It has been several decades since Virginians adopted the custom of letting the president know of their discontent. From 1970 to the present, only once has the gubernatorial candidate who won in Virginia been from the same party that occupied the White House. That was in 2013, when Democrat Terry McAuliffe defeated Republican Ken Cuccinelli by a margin of 2.5 percentage points.