The statewide Democratic ticket is set for the November election as state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi and former Del. Jay Jones won their primaries for lieutenant governor and attorney general Tuesday night.
They will join former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee for governor, on the general election ticket.
Hashmi, a Democrat from Chesterfield County, beat five opponents in a six-way primary for lieutenant governor on Tuesday. She is the first Muslim and first Indian-American nominated to statewide office in Virginia.
Hashmi won her primary with 27.49% of the vote. Former Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney came in second with 26.65%, within the 1% margin to request a recount, should Stoney choose, but outside of the 0.5% margin that would trigger a state-funded recount.
State Sen. Aaron Rouse, D-Virginia Beach, came in third with 26.16%. Dr. Babur Lateef, a physician and chair of the Prince William County School Board, collected 8.44% of the vote; Alex Bastani, a union leader and attorney from Northern Virginia, garnered 5.70% of the vote; and Victor Salgado, a former federal prosecutor, had 5.57%.
It was a three-person contest on Tuesday, with Hashmi and Stoney trading off the lead for most of the evening, and Rouse claiming third place except for a brief moment when he held the top spot. In the end it may have been the city of Richmond that put Hashmi over the finish line as the votes flowed in in her favor, and Stoney sank in the locality he led for eight years.
Hashmi issued a scathing rebuke against the Trump administration in her victory speech.
“In Washington we’ve got extremists who are working overtime to strip away our freedom, to control our bodies, to silence our vote, to divide us by race and by faith and identity. They want to bring that chaos here — we are not going to let them,” she said. “We’re facing a pivotal moment in our history, and while the MAGA-driven Republican ticket might try to take us backwards, I’m running — and you’re running with me — with the unshakable belief in what Virginia can be.”
Hashmi is a former educator. She moved to the Richmond area in the early 1990s and worked for three decades as a professor at the University of Richmond and later at Reynolds Community College. She was elected to the state Senate in 2019 and was named chair of the Senate Education and Health Committee in 2024. She has focused her campaign platform on access to reproductive health care, improving public education and affordable housing.
She will go on to face Republican candidate and former talk radio host John Reid in November.
Jones, of Norfolk, beat Commonwealth’s Attorney Shannon Taylor, of Henrico, with roughly 51% of the vote. He will go on to face Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares in the general election.
“The most powerful corporations and special interests believe that Virginia’s government should be beholden to them. They will spend more trying to beat us in November by funding Donald Trump’s pro-bono attorney, Jason Miyares. And we are ready for that fight because it’s not their government, it’s yours,” Jones said in a statement after the race was called. “As your next Attorney General, I will return the power back to you. To the people of Virginia.”
Jones earned his law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as an assistant attorney general in the District of Columbia, where he was a member of the Office of Consumer Protection. He also “led the fight on behalf of the Virginia NAACP against the Youngkin Administration to protect voting rights,” according to his website.
Jones, now 36, represented the 89th District in the House of Delegates from 2018 until December 2021, when he resigned from the seat he had been reelected to in the previous month. He attributed that decision to his wife’s pregnancy with their first child. He ran in the Democratic primary for attorney general in 2021 but lost to Mark Herring.
The two Democrats join Spanberger on the statewide ticket. Spanberger is running for governor against Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.