Phill Kline, former Kansas Attorney General and current law professor at Liberty University School of Law, warned that Jay Jones’ victory as Virginia’s new attorney general illustrates the growing power of a coordinated network of left-leaning nonprofits and billionaire donors who influence elections behind the scenes.
Jones, who was criticized on the campaign trail over the surfacing of remarks he allegedly made calling for the killings of police officers and wishing death upon a political rival and their children, defeated incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares in Tuesday’s election by nearly 6 points.
Kline, on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, argued that Jones’ victory could not be understood simply as the result of his campaign’s messaging or voter preference.
He explained how a vast network of progressive nonprofits, funded by wealthy donors which operate largely outside of campaign finance disclosure laws, uses sophisticated micro-targeting technologies and localized outreach to turn out voters in key races, such as Jones’.
“Jay Jones won election day by about six and a half points. He won absentee balloting by 10 points. He won early person balloting by 15 points. This apparatus not only affects early voting, but it is also the messaging that motivates and turns out people on election day, and you’re not going to see it in campaign finance reports. It’s all hidden through nonprofit spending and leftist billionaires,” Kline said.
He claimed this apparatus has existed since at least the mid-2000s, citing his own 2006 Kansas attorney general race as an early target.
According to Kline, figures like George Soros and John Podesta helped build a system in which vast sums of money flow through nonprofits to fund voter outreach and data-driven micro-targeting.
“I’m uniquely qualified to speak about this because in my reelect for Attorney General in 2006, it was one of the first efforts by the left’s billionaire club to defeat a candidate, and that was myself. They did it through technology and micro-targeting…In 2006, when the technology was relatively new, they organized in Kansas a campaign to defeat me, and that campaign was actually operated outside of the Democratic candidates’ campaign by nonprofits and third party billionaires who reached out to voters,” Kline explained.
“I didn’t know that message was going out because it wasn’t on TV, it wasn’t on radio. It was through direct messages to those voters, through micro-targeting and computer strategies that were not known very well at the time,” he added.
Kline went on to criticize Republican political strategists for failing to adapt to this reality, noting that while Democrats have built a highly localized and technologically sophisticated voter-turnout operation, Republican consultants still focus on traditional campaign methods such as television and radio advertising.
“I’ve been preaching this for 20 years now that we need to go local. We need to get a structure in place through various cutouts and nonprofits to identify and turn out voters just like the left has, or we need to eliminate nonprofit status,” he stressed.
Looking ahead to Jones’ tenure as Virginia attorney general, Kline predicted that Jones would not overtly violate laws but would exercise his prosecutorial discretion in a partisan manner.
As seen by similar “Soros-backed prosecutors” in other states, Kline suggested that Jones could selectively enforce laws such as pursuing cases against political opponents while overlooking wrongdoing by allies.
“They can take a bad case and bring it to court anyway to punish an opponent. They can ignore a good case if it’s of a friend or they don’t believe it’s politically palatable. This is what we are seeing with the Soros prosecutors across the nation. They’re ignoring clear violations of the law because they’ve decided, politically, that the law should not be enforced,” Kline said.
“That’s the power of a prosecutor, and that’s how I expect Jay Jones to change the attorney general’s office. His priorities are much different than the priorities of Virginians, and we’re going to see that through the choices he makes and where he allocates the resources of that office,” he added.
Kline concluded with a warning about the consequences of such politicized law enforcement, arguing that when prosecutors or attorneys general abuse their power, they undermine the foundational American principle of equal justice under the law.
“It destroys liberty for everybody…if those offices are used to target political opponents and to treat people differently under the law, That is a foundational breach with the founding of this country and its growth through the last two and a half centuries. We have to not go down that path, but I’m worried that we are,” Kline said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
