Jason Miyares published the receipts on Friday.
Virginia’s former Attorney General took to Cardinal News on September 4 and laid out what the Commonwealth looked like when he and Governor Glenn Youngkin took office, and what it looked like when they handed it back. Unemployment. Murder rates. Overdose deaths. He is answering a column that called the Virginia Renaissance a myth.
Miyares served as Attorney General of Virginia from 2022 to 2026. He ran the Commonwealth’s legal department for four years and is not estimating what changed on his watch. Here is his piece in full.
I am always amused when leftwing activists simply refuse to absorb clear facts. Case in point is Shawn Weneta’s recent op-ed saying the verdict on the economic and public safety turnaround under Gov. Youngkin, dubbed the “Virginia Renaissance,” is already in. While he is correct that the verdict is in, he is clearly reading the wrong one.
The bottom line is that by every objective measure, Virginia was stronger, safer and more prosperous after four years of the Youngkin-Miyares Administration than the commonwealth we inherited. The stunning facts of the Virginia Renaissance simply cannot be ignored: more economic investment in Virginia under Gov. Youngkin than the last six governors combined. A state government that was well-managed, leaving office with a $572 million budget surplus, a $1.8 billion cash cushion and $4.7 billion in the rainy day fund, with $9 billion in tax relief for Virginians and consistent rankings as one of the best states in the nation to do business.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but never to their own facts. In this case, what Democrats don’t get to rewrite are unemployment numbers, economic investment, murder rates or overdose statistics after the fact.
Worth remembering is the Virginia that Youngkin and I inherited when we took office. The Virginia of 2021 was dying, literally, financially and figuratively. Coming into office, we had the highest levels of addiction deaths ever recorded in the history of the commonwealth, a murder rate at a 20-year high and a violent crime rate at a 30-year high. It was a Virginia that was ranked 46th out of 50 states in post-COVID job creation, where our public schools were among the last to reopen, which led to a devastating impact on learning loss and the mental health of Virginia’s children. All of these factors led to the first time in close to 100 years of more people moving out of the state than moving in.
There’s more. Rad the entire article “Miyares: The verdict on the Virginia Renaissance isn’t in the op-ed page. It’s in the data.” — Cardinal News, September 4, 2026.
Miyares names a specific measure for the Virginia he inherited: 46th out of 50 states in post-COVID job creation. That is a ranking, published, checkable, and it is the single cleanest thing in his column, because the same measure is still being kept.
Virginia now ranks 48th in the nation in job growth. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show the Commonwealth shed 51,400 jobs between May 2025 and May 2026, more than any other state in the country. Potomac Local reported the same finding in July.
Forty-sixth was the emergency Miyares and Youngkin described in 2022. Forty-eighth is where Virginia sits one year into Governor Abigail Spanberger’s term, with Attorney General Jay Jones and Lieutenant Governor Ghazala Hashmi holding the other two statewide offices and no Republican brake anywhere in Richmond. The measure did not merely stop improving. It went past where it started.
This is the second time in three weeks Miyares has put this argument in print. On August 14 he laid out in the New York Post, in five steps, how Virginia Democrats are dismantling the Commonwealth’s turnaround — the piece the Committee covered on August 18, the same week the Governor’s own firefighters censured her.
August was the warning. September is the record. The distinction matters, because a warning can be argued with and a ranking cannot. Nobody in Richmond has disputed the murder-rate figures, the opioid judgments, or the job-creation baseline. They have simply changed the subject.
Fairfax families received the tax relief and lived in the lower crime rate without ever being told which decisions produced them. That is the ordinary condition of good government: it is invisible while it works. It becomes visible on the way out, in a jobs report, in a utility bill, in a budget that no longer has a cushion under it.
Virginia’s next statewide ballot is in 2027. When a candidate tells you the Renaissance was a myth, ask which of Miyares’ numbers they intend to dispute. Then ask Governor Abigail Spanberger why the measure that read 46th when she inherited it reads 48th today.