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The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
It's a Numbers Game: The Numbers Behind Virginia Politics: What the Jay Jones Controversy Reveals
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This is an iHeart podcast.
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Welcome back to a numbers Game with Ryan Graduski. It is Monday, October 6, 2025. There are 29 days left till the 2025 elections. There are local elections happening all over the country, including Virginia, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. Make a plan to go vote, vote by mail, vote early, vote on election day, whatever you need to do, just remember to go vote in these local elections. Local elections matter much more than the national elections to your everyday life, even though they are not nearly as sexy and they don't have many people show up to vote. Now, I know I told many frequent listeners this podcast I was going to do an episode on Virginia last Monday, and then I pushed it back a week to focus on New Jersey because they had all that breaking news. And it's a good thing because so much information regarding the Virginia election happened over the last week that I would have missed out on it had I otherwise done it, you know, on time. So it's great that we didn't rush. Okay, first things first, let's talk about polling. Now, remember, polls are not predictors of the future. They are snapshots of the present. I remind everybody that because people believe that a poll said something, therefore it's going to happen or likely to happen, it is just how people feel in the present. They could change at any time. So a poll was conducted by Scholar School and released by the Washington Post. Now, I know what you may be thinking. It's the Washington Post. There are a bunch of liberals, but they actually have a pretty decent track record in the state of Virginia, which is not an easy state to poll. In 2021, their. Their poll had Democrat Terry McAuliffe winning by one point. He ended up losing by two. So that's within the margin of error, means it's fairly accurate. And in 2024, they had Kamala Harris winning Virginia by 8. She won by 5.8. So once again, within the margin of error, though slightly over sampling Democrats, but not to an outrageous degree, not overly, where it's like going to win by 20 and she wins by five. It's, it's, it's fine. It's perfectly within the margin of error. They had a poll on upcoming statewide elections in Virginia and found that Democrats had a comfortable lead in all three major races. First, there's the election for governor. They had Democrat Abigail spamberger up by 12 points. This is in line with some other polls, like the Christopher Newport University poll, a terrible poll poll, by the way, like, completely inaccurate. And an Emerson poll. Some other pollsters, like Trafalgar, which nailed it in 2021, they had. They have Spamberger only winning by five points, which is roughly in line with some other polls. So you see you have two collections of poll herding. You have the polls that say that the Democrats for governors up by five points, and then the ones that she says she's going to win by double digits. The Washington Post Scholar poll also looked at the other two statewide races for lieutenant governor, who which in Virginia is elected separately from governor and the attorney general race. Now, they found that the Democrat for lieutenant governor, Gazala Hassami, is up by four points, which is not a great lead, especially given that the governor is up by a huge amount and that Jay Jones, the Democrat nominee for attorney general, leads Republican incumbent Jason Miares by six points among likely voters. Interesting enough, the same poll finds that a majority of Virginians really agree with President Trump on several big issues. When asked if they supported policies to find and deport illegal immigrants, Virginians said Yes by a 49 to 44% margin, including a majority or plurality of men, Republicans, moderates, whites, voters over the age of 30, and voters of all educational backgrounds, aside from postgraduate degree holders. When asked if the state and local government should be doing more to help apprehend illegal immigrants, 50% of Virginians said yes, 47 said no. And then when asked if public schools should allow trans girls to play in sports with biological girls, nearly 70% said no. They said they shouldn't be allowed to. Only 20, 20, 20% said yes. Now, interestingly, the main issue, Republican candidate for governor, Winsome Sears, the current Lieutenant governor, has been campaigning on since day one. And the centerpiece of her entire campaign, basically the focus of all her ads has been transgender sports, something that Virginians overwhelmingly agree with her on. The thing is that it's not a high ranking issue, not nearly as much as the economy, which she's focused much, much less on than the transgender sports issue. That conversation, however, started to change over the weekend, and that is because of two controversies that landed at the feet of Democratic Attorney General candidate Jay Jones. First, it was revealed that Jones was convicted of reckless driving in 2022, where he was driving at 116 miles per hour down a highway. It was going well over 50 miles over the speed limit. He ended up having to perform 500 hours of community service, and the community service he served under was his own political action committee. Not exactly cleaning streets on the side of the highway or cleaning the service or on the side of the highway. That seemed bad, but it was nothing compared to the story that came out by Audra Fahlberg at National Review. This came out over the weekend that Jones had texted a Republican colleague in the state legislature. He serves in the state legislature, texted a Republican colleague about how annoyed he was that fellow Republicans were honoring a deceased legislator. This also happened in 2022. I'm sure many of you have heard about these messages, but if you haven't, I'm going to tell you right now it's dark. It's very, very dark. So prepare yourself. Democrat Jay Jones said that if Republican colleague is. If his Republican colleague, former House Speaker Todd Gilbert, Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert, died before him, he was going to, quote, piss on his grave. He then said, if Hitler, Pol Pot and Todd Gilbert, the speaker of the Virginia House, were in a room and he had two bullets and a gun, he would shoot Todd Gilbert twice. I'm going to preface by saying that this is a line from a very popular TV show called the Office. Michael Scott says this at one point. As much as Democrats have used that saying that is a joke and that he was just joking. His Republican colleague was not taking it as a joke. She didn't reply with a laughing emoji or an lol. He wrote it was Republican colleague said, please stop. This is not two buddies palling around and having quote, unquote, locker room talk or whatever. One person is clearly uncomfortable in this conversation. They say, it makes me really uncomfortable when you talk about hurting people or wishing death upon them. So the idea that some people have, that this was like all just, you know, they were just joking at work. It wasn't a joke. Only not one person was very clearly not laughing and telling them to stop. That part of the conversation was dark. And the Republican colleague who they're texting, the Republican colleague's name is Kerry Conyer, by the way. Kerry apparently calls Jay Jones and they hop on a conversation and it takes a turn over the phone. Now, we don't know the exact words that are being said, but they resume texting after the phone conversation. J. Jones says in the text, I wasn't attacking you. I was trying to understand your logic. And the Republican colleague, Kerry Conyers replies, you weren't trying to understand. You were talking about hoping Jennifer Gilbert, Todd Gilbert's wife, that Jennifer Gilbert's children would die. Jones, totally unrepentant, replied, yes, I've told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy. Kerry, the Republican clarified that Jones actually said over the phone that he hoped the children were murdered in the state speaker's wife's arms while she watched, which led Carrie Conyer to hang up the phone on him. Joan said one last text message in exchange. I mean, do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil and that they are breeding little fascists? Question mark. Yes. The children here he's talking about wish to see murder are very clearly that I've seen in pictures under the age of 10. One of them, I'm completely judging by the way they look, looks about 5 years old. This is really disturbing. It is really dark. It is really showing his true feelings for a Republican who, by the way, why he was annoyed with a Republican was because he was saying something nice about a deceased Democrat colleague. That is what triggered him to be so angry, is that a Republican was saying something nice about his fellow colleague in the state legislature who had passed away, who happened to be a Democrat. This isn't a joke. This is a deeply disturbed individual. Right. And you could see in his long string of things that happened around the year 2022, when the story broke out, Jones actually lashed out. He said, quote, like all people, I've sent text messages that I regret and I believe that violent rhetoric has no place in our politics. But let me be clear. What is happening is that Attorney General race. Right now, Jason Miares is dropping smears through Trump controlled media organizations to assault my character and rescue his desperate campaign. This race is about whether Trump can control Virginia or Virginians can control Virginia. By the way, the National Review is not Trump controlled. If you're not a frequent reader of the National Review, it is very conservative. It's a conservative critical magazine of the Trump administration. And they famously published a magazine cover in 2016 called the Case Against Trump. A few hours later, he and the reaction started pouring in and they were all horrified at what Jade Jones had said. He released a second statement. He said, I take full responsibility for my actions and I want to issue my deepest apologies for Speaker Gilbert and his family. Reading back those words made me sick to my stomach. I'm embarrassed, ashamed and sorry. That was not his first reaction. I think that it's really important to say. It wasn't until people started saying this is really gross that he said, this is not just going to be a little political tiff where we all kind of forget what I just sat there and said. This is not going to be a moment, you know, as watered down as our politics have gotten, talking about having children being murdered was really a line that thankfully people still can't cross. Democrats running for office and Democrats elected statewide in Virginia said he needs to be accountable. But they didn't call him to drop out. Neither did the Washington Post, which wrote an editorial saying you need to be held accountable. I don't know what accountable means, aside from dropping out of the race and quitting, doing politics like that's what accountable is. Saying there's no room for that kind of rhetoric in our politics is great, but when someone does use that kind of rhetoric, they should be punished for it. And if you're really serious about toning down the, toning down the heat, you need to take the ultimate step and you need to sit there and say, you cannot vote for him. You cannot support him. Please vote for the Republican. We're going to win the other two statewide races. It doesn't or likely to win definitely the governor's race and possibly the lieutenant governor's race. We're ahead in the polls. It's time to be serious people. And that means seriously not supporting J. Jones. They did not do that. And in fact, several Democrats doubled down in their support. He didn't lose a single national Democrat endorsement, though I will say a few Democratic state legislative candidates did walk away from him. So credit goes to where it's due. For those few brave people who were like, this is just too much. For those of you who don't know much about Jay Jones, this is the same man who once called for a Norfolk police lieutenant to be fired after donating $25 to Kyle Rittenhouse's legal defense. And according to the report that I read, the police lieutenant did lose his job. So J. Jones does believe in accountability, that people lose their jobs when they do something that he finds beyond the pale. Just not him. He is doubling down that he is running this race. He is doing this. And it has opened the door for Republicans to talk about something that people feel and understand. Republicans released an ad over the weekend. I don't know how much money they're putting behind the ad about J. Jones's comments. Here's the problem for Republicans and Jason Miora is the attorney general nominee who is the incumbent, has the most money basically of anyone in the race and he's got millions to spend. Here's his problem. Virginia has 45 days of early voting. As of Saturday, 354,000 people had already cast their ballots. That's about 8% of the total from the 2024 election in Virginia and 11% of the 2021 election in Virginia. The governor's race in Virginia So a lot of people who may have been horrified and said, wow, I can support that kind of person already voted for him. And the mail, by the way, lags. So it's well over 354,000 people have cast their ballot because a state shouldn't have two months of early voting. That's too long. And I'm sure I can, I, I will bet my bottom dollar there were Republicans who absolutely supported such a long voting voting time period. But that's what happens when late breaking news comes. Hundreds of thousands of people already cast their ballot before all the information is there for them to see. Virginians do not register to vote by party. So we don't know how they would have voted because it's not like New Jersey where it's very clearly, here's the Republican total out, here's the Democrat turnout. Virginia, we can only look at what precincts and counties they are voting in. What we do know right now is that precincts, which is like smaller than a counties, it's just a little area. Precincts where Trump won in 2024 have had about 136,000 voters turnout, while precincts that Harris won have 217,000 voters come out. So it's not 2 to 1, but it's, it's a good, it's a good split. Democrats definitely have had the advantage because they've taken advantage of the male campaign. Early voting in person has just began. It should tighten. Hopefully it tightens. But Republicans have a lot of catching up to do like they do in New Jersey because of the mail in voting. We'll see if J. Jones's comment really changes the game. I think it's something that is so horrifying and so disgusting. Suburban women who otherwise vote Democrat but maybe voted for Glenn Youngkin should turn on Jay Jones and maybe it will affect the entire Democratic ticket who refuses to hold him actually accountable and asking him to drop out. With me today on today's episode is an expert on all things Virginia politics. My conversation with him is coming up next. My guest on today's episode is Christian Hines, the oracle of Virginia, expert of all things in the states politics. Thank you for coming on, Christian. I appreciate it.
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Thanks for having me, Ryan.
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So, Christian, the text messages from Jay Jones have obviously been a lot of controversy. Just this morning, Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough. Morning Joe called for him to drop out. How has the text messages from Jay Jones changed or has it changed the state of the election?
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So this is a pretty difficult topic, right? Virginia has not really had a lot of ticket Split voting. And really the last 20 something years. Right. Last time that this happened was 2005, where Republicans lost the governorship and then they ended up holding on to the down ballot race for Attorney General. Since then, it's been, you know, if the Democrats win statewide or the Republicans win statewide, then they carry everybody underneath them. I know that a lot of people have this idea that this year might be a little bit different, especially with, you know, we have this scandal on the Lieutenant Governor's ballot for Republicans. The polling doesn't really look that great for the top of the ticket. But obviously the context in this case is that J. Jones said some truly awful stuff. I mean, I'm sure that everybody who's watching this already knows about it, but the context is, is that he basically went full mask off, texted another Republican legislator that he wanted to see the former speaker of the House of Delegates at the time, the speaker of the House of Delegates, Republican Todd Gilbert, dead by his own hands, and that he wanted to see Gilbert's children die in their mother's arms. And obviously Republican delegate Kerry Coyner, just like most normal people, did not take kindly to that. And then Jay dug himself an even deeper hole when he tried to explain the situation to Kerry and basically just confirmed that he actually did mean that. And now here we are three years later, and this news has come out. So obviously everybody thinks that this is going to affect the race. And it is. I mean, Jay has not really done a great job defending himself. Right. His first press release that he put out, he basically said that he was the victim and that, you know, this is an attack by Trump by, by conservative outlets that are going after him. And then the response from some Democrat officials in Virginia, not even just the top of the ticket. Right. But we're talking about Louise Lucas, we're talking about state legislators in Richmond. It was really weak, if you think about it. They stopped short of condemning it outright. They said that they didn't agree with his words, but they didn't condemn him. They didn't disavow him. They didn't say that they would stop campaigning with him. And certainly nobody has called on him to drop out. And so then you have one more point that's added on to this whole saga, which is that a few days after that, state, you know, our county level and locality level Democratic Party organizations, primarily in Virginia beach, but not just Virginia beach, came out and said that they're still supporting him. So, I mean, I think that we have to be taking seriously the idea that, yes, he's going to be obviously the worst performing Democrat on the ballot. But I think he still has a shot in this thing, to be honest. And I cannot believe that I'm saying that under normal political circumstances he should be losing this race. If he even gets to the general election by a double digit landslide, there should be like Mark Robinson in reverse. And so he probably has like a 50, 50 shot of winning.
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So there is a, there was a race in 2013 for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general in Virginia. And lieutenant, the lieutenant governor was a black pastor, I can't remember his name now, E.W. jackson or something like that. And he lost by an 11 point landslide. And the Republican running for Attorney general lost by like less than a thousand votes. It was a few hundred recount. It was a recount. It was a very, very close election. And the Ken Cucinelli, the governor candidate would have likely one had a Libertarian not also been on the ticket taking 5% of the vote from that election cycle. In that case, the candidate above them did not affect the Attorney General's case. And it was a very big ticket splitting election. The fact that, I mean, is Winsome Sears really holding down the whole ticket in your estimate?
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No, what I think it is is that just the secular trends in Virgin Virginia have finally reached a tipping point. I mean, I've been saying this since 2014. You can ask my good friend Nick Freitas, who's in the legislature. He's actually retiring this year. He and I have been going at this for over 10 years now of debating which direction the state was going in. And I still have the original Facebook post from back when I was in college where I was like, we're doomed in Virginia. I've already looked at the number. You know, I was like 20 at the time. And I've been believing this for a long time now that we were just moving in this direction of being basically a permanent blue state. And I think a lot of people kind of forget this because of Youngkin's win in 2021 and even the fact that Republicans have been competitive, you know, through Trump's presidency, with the exception of 2020, he kept it close. In 2024, I was following the state.
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Every day on X.
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That's how you and I first met. Yeah, it was, it was, it was almost six, it was like five and a half. And it was basically in line with where it was in 2016. And so I think a lot of people have looked at that. They've looked at the repeated over performance of Republicans down ballot. They' well, down ballot. We kind of forget this because they don't control the legislature. But you know, it's a one seat majority for Democrats currently in both seats, you know, or sorry, both chambers of the legislature. And they only fell short by just a few thousand votes in 2023 of actually capturing a trifecta. So we look at these things and we say that, well, Virginia's still a swing state, it just leans blue. But I think if you look a little bit deeper at the long term trajectory, to me it's pretty clear that the state is starting to move out of reach for Republicans in the same way that Colorado already has. And I think we're just at that tipping point. The one silver lining is, is that a lot of this has been driven by Northern Virginia, which obviously is directly affected by the federal level. And so if you get say a massive reduction in federal expenditures, federal contractors and federal workers, then that, that could theoretically shift the state back into a competitive environment. But, but at the moment I just, I think that we're, we're kind of moving into this perennial blue state category.
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Jason Miares has raised the most amount of money as Everybody and actually 1, 1 interest he's been able to raise so much money is that the Muslim Brotherhood of the United States is headquartered in Virginia. And he's done, he's opened up investigations into the Muslim Brotherhood of America and he's gotten a lot of support from Jewish donors across the country, like New York. Other places have sat there and said, we need someone who's going to hold these groups accountable and he's the only one who's going to be able to do it. Given that he has so many millions of dollars cash on hand, he has the ability of getting this message really out there. Now about 8 to 10% of the Virginia electorate has already vot. Do you think that if he spends the money correctly, there's a way that he can pull this out even if the top of the ticket is lagging?
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I mean, sure, of course, especially with, you know, the, again, the type of ammunition that he's working with. I probably shouldn't use that analogy, to be honest. Like, you know, in terms, in terms of what Jay Jones has done and said and then his response to the original story, which was, you know, arguably just made it only worse. I definitely think that Miyares has a shot. But you know, I remember that Jeb Bush at one point had, you know, an infinite amount of money too. And I don't want to make that comparison to say that MIARA is the equivalent of Jeb Bush? Because I know that in some Republican circles that would be taken as an insult. And I don't, I don't mean it as an insult. I simply mean it as an analogy here that, that, you know, money does not change the fact that secular trends are moving in a particular direction.
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100. It's just that.
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Do I think that MIARS has a shot? Yeah, it's just I do, but I think it's a 50, 50 shot.
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It's just that you could broadcast this message at a larger and you can make sure everybody hears it. You have your own set of modeling, which I find so interesting. In your modeling, you found it as a. So far the early vote has 60, 40 Democrats. How do you get to that estimate?
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So the way that this works is, is that Virginia collects all of this data. They just don't collect party affiliation. We're. We're one of many states that we don't register by party. But there are many groups out there that do a really good job of modeling partisanship. There's plenty on the right that do this. And so what they end up doing is that they just assign affiliation score based on a variety of metrics that I won't get into because it's very convoluted and boring. But the point is that you can model how much to the left or right somebody is. And once you combine that with how often they vote, their propensity in voting in the last four elections and in Virginia, that's easy because we have an election every single year, well, then you can end up determining using the early vote numbers, how many of those people are likely to show up on election day. And at that point you have both halves of the puzzle that need to be put together. And then you can end up creating a pretty reliable metric for what you think the whole election's going to look like. I did this in. Well, technically I've been doing this since 2019, but people haven't really been paying attention until 2021. I did it myself privately for a campaign that I worked on in 2019. I did it in 2020 for Freitas Congressional race, ironically against Spamberger. And then I did it in 2021 for, for Youngkin. I didn't do it for his campaign. I did it for that race. I didn't do it in 2022. I had other stuff going on.
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We're just being autistic.
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And then in 2023, I did it.
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We're doing. We're Just being autistic.
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Yeah. I just do it because I'm, I, you know, I geek out about this. I mean, I have done it for campaigns before, but I do it myself as well. Just because, you know, I do it for the love of the game and I've done it in 2023 and obviously you and I first met from doing it in 2024. Last. I still kick myself at how, how it could have been closer if I had just tweaked a few things that hopefully I will get right this year.
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Very close.
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My goal is to get it within a point. I was, but technically I was just over a point off in part because Rockingham county double counted their mail in vote, which is, I think that's cheating. Literally, that is, it's unfair.
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Okay, so what I like about you, aside from being very thorough, is that a lot of election analysis people are just brazen liberals and they just pretend that they're being fair or non, like whatever. Like even. I really like Chaz Nutty Comb a lot, but he is a lib and like, you know, he's very much rooting for one side to win. They're openly sitting there and saying Democrats can only win the state House, but they can get to a veto proof majority. Do you think that's possible that Democrats.
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Republicans will lose even if this is a bad year? Right. If it just, you know, everything breaks in their direction. When you look at the maps, they would have to end up flipping, you know, seats that voted for Trump by, you know, eight plus points. There's plenty of districts in Virginia that have been consistently Republican, even if it's been less by, you know, less than 10 points. And they would have to flip almost all of those type of seats in order to get to 66, 67 in the house of Delegates. You know, could they pick up multiple seats? I think they can. The maps are heavily weighted in their favor. There's one district in Henrico that they're, they're very likely to flip in large part because they almost wanted in 2023, despite having a horrible campaign that was run on the part of a Democrat that, you know, was embroiled in unique scandal of her own. We'll just, we'll just leave that.
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Yes.
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And they almost won that seat. So I mean, yeah, there's plenty of, of, of target opportunities for them. But, you know, is there enough for them to get to 67 or even 66? I just, I think that, I think it would be a stretch for them to get to 60. Is it, is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? Probably not.
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So there is a Christopher Newport poll coming out today. I don't really like that as a pollster. I don't think they're very accurate. I think they oversample Democrats way too much. What are signs that people who are interested should be looking at to see how the election is swinging and swaying in your mind going forward in the last 30 days?
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I agree with you that CNU does not have a good track record. They're consistently overshooting Democrats. They've done this for years. I mean, they did it even, I believe, in 2020. And it was hard to overshoot Democrats in Virginia in 2020. Right. They won the state by 10 points and yet CNU had, I'm pretty sure Biden by like 12 or 15 or something like that. So I don't really put much stock in cnu. But I would say that you can, you could look at maybe the cross tabs. I don't know if they're going to have anything about early voting. If they have that, I would take that seriously. I would not take their top line party identification. If they include that, I would look at that as well. So there's, there's going to be things in that poll that are valuable even if the poll itself isn't valuable. And that could be indicative of how the early vote and thus the entire election might end up going.
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Is there any other things that we should be looking out for? Any pollsters that you look at, besides the CNU poll that's coming out, is there anything we should be looking at too?
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Yeah, believe it or not, I mean, you were talking a minute ago about how, you know, so many people on election Twitter are on the left and they are like. And I am, I mean, Ryan, you know this like I am, you know, without hesitation, I will admit that I am as far to the right as you possibly can go in this fear. But you know, I do try to pride myself in getting the outcome correct. And on the flip side, there's one outlet that I would never recommend them for anything other than this, and that's the Washington Post. Washington Post, you know, terrible magazine, you know, not magazine, terrible newspaper in my opinion. But their polling track record is not awful. In Virginia. They had Harris winning Virginia by six and last year in 2024 and she won it by almost six. And they, they were one of a handful of outlets that said that this was going to be a very competitive race for governor in 2021. And it turned out to be.
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And well, they had her among six.
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Not bad.
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They did six among register voters, not likely voters. They had an eight. I talked about that at the top of the show. They are a good pollster. They lean a little to the left, but they are good pollster. But I don't know if they're going to do another poll before the election day. That's the only thing. But I hope that they do because things may have changed with the whole texting scandal. I think it is a serious scandal. I think it's actually real and it could change things whit Christian, where can people go to read more about you? Your analysis, which is very, very good. You're very thorough and you're one of the smarter people who is not an open, you know, liberal rooting for Democrats to win and just, you know, trend forecasting for it. Where can people go to read more of your stuff?
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So I'm mostly on X Ryan, you you know about this because, you know, we've been following each other for so long. But you could just follow me on @Christian Heinz and it's a really weird way to spell Heinz. It's H E I E N S. So like Old MacDonald E I E. Yeah, I don't know where that came from, but you know, it is a German last name. So that's where I post most of this stuff if they're really into, you know, just in the weeds type of stuff about politics. I also co host the Making the Argument podcast with Nick Freitas, who is a he's actually my state delegate. Currently he's leaving office at the end of this year but but he's also prominent online as well and I'm on his show twice a week. So those are the two places that if people really wanted to, they could find me.
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Well, Christian, thank you for being here. I really appreciate it.
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Thanks a lot, Ryan.
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Now it's time for Ask Me Anything. If you want to be part of the Ask Me Anything segment, please email me ryanumbersgame podcast.com that's ryanumbers plural numbers game podcast.com I love these questions. They help the show. I look forward to them every day and I reply to every single one either privately or on Amazon air. So this question comes from Junipero. This is a pseudonym. So Junipero, thank you for listening to this podcast. He asked for some clarifications on things I have said on previous episodes. He says, is New Jersey going from blue to purple the unusual a given West Virginia trajectory in recent decades. I don't remember saying that, but I do compare the states often because it just shows how quickly states can change. From 1968 to 1988, for 20 years, Virginia was a pretty solidly Republican state and West Virginia was a solidly Democrat state. West Virginia voted for Democrats in 8 out of 10 elections from 1960 to 2000. Remember, Bill Clinton won West Virginia twice, as did Jimmy Carter against Ronald Reagan in 1980. I was probably just talking about why how states can change very quickly in the blink of an eye. And I probably sometimes brain is going faster than my mouth so I'm I forget a word when I'm just ad libbing, which is why I write everything down. New Jersey is turning into a swing state though, because something very unique is happening in the Tri state area that is universally not happening nationwide. And it's a lot of that. A lot of ethnic minorities, especially recent immigrants, have really turned on Democrats. Plus a lot. There is in like places like New York City, there is a declining black population. They are the most loyal Democratic voters in New Jersey. It is a stagnant black American population. That does not mean black Americans, period. That means historically black Americans. Black immigrants are responsible for most of the increase of the black population. It also helps in New Jersey that 15% of the population is Italian. Italians are one of the most reliably Republican voting blocs who are white. He also asks, are Armenian slash Georgians really white? Now I ask because technically I'm Armenian and I've always described it as West Asian, given the east of Bosporus. Just I don't know what that means. Sorry, but are Armenians and Georgians really white? Yes. Under the census, Armenians are categorized as white, which is what I am using when I'm describing them is how census data is Looking at in 2010, the census officially changed where Armenians, Georgians and West Asians are categorized as white. You can call it whatever you like to, but on the census data, when you're looking at census data, they are counted as white. So Kim Kardashian is white white. Despite, despite despite her fake tan and all the men that she has dated, she is white according to the census. Lastly, any thoughts advice about attending law school? I work for FedSoc and on our GOP congressional campaign, among other places, and I'm submitting applications at the end of the month. This is a very difficult question for me because not only did I not go to law school, I barely went to college and I went to just a community college nearby. I was not a good student my entire life. It's just not that I don't appreciate someone who goes get a degree. It's just I don't learn in a classroom. I'm not like that. But my best advice I could give is look at where the most opportunities are to either clerk or to get an internship at a top law firm. Like, the job economy sucks. The job market sucks Right now. You want to go in. If you're in a sale for three years, you want to go in to make as much connections as you possibly can so you don't have to send a resume online. You can actually make phone calls and get meetings before hand. I think that that's the best advice you could possibly give. Figure out which law firm focuses of what you want to. What you want to do and really make sure they have a good list of people who went there and try to hustle and network. You know, you want to. You want to go to college, whether it be law school or anything else. And you want, you. You go there to make people, to make connections. Because the minute you graduate, you got to hit the ground running. Because what I tell myself every day working in all my various jobs and what I have told myself, I'm 38 now for the last 20 years, is that there are a million people behind you who want your job. And you better hustle to try to beat every one of them. Even though you can't see them, they are all wanting your job. So you better work at it every day like you've never done it before and like you're someone who's got something to lose. So that's my best advice. I don't know if it helps, I didn't go to law school, but. But good luck. I hope you get into whatever law firm you apply to and I hope you keep listening to the podcast. Thank you all for listening. If you like this podcast, please like and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast, wherever you listen. And I will see you guys on Thursday. Go vote.
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