Since leaving office, former Attorney General Jason Miyares has begun to describe the Youngkin years as the “Virginia Renaissance,” a period of conservative governance he argues made Virginia safer, stronger and more prosperous.
It is an ambitious attempt to redefine the legacy of an administration that voters had just repudiated at the ballot box.
This past November, Virginians decisively rejected the Youngkin-Miyares record. Abigail Spanberger won the governorship by more than 527,000 votes. Democrats swept every statewide office, defeating Miyares himself, and gained 13 seats in the House of Delegates.
That is an unusual way for voters to endorse a renaissance.
The phrase itself is telling. Miyares says that “some” dubbed the Youngkin years the “Virginia Renaissance.”
Who, exactly?
It was largely a marketing slogan repeated until repetition was apparently supposed to transform branding into historical fact.
Virginians seem to have missed the memo.
But elections are only one measure of a governing record. If Miyares wants Virginians to remember the Youngkin years as a renaissance, then that record deserves examination, including the parts that do not fit comfortably within the mythology.
I know something about one of them.
Enhanced earned sentence credits were the first major policy I worked on. Miyares spent years portraying the policy as an indiscriminate jailbreak. During his reelection campaign, he repeatedly claimed it was responsible for dozens of deaths.
Cardinal News examined the records supplied by Miyares’s own office. They didn’t support his accusation. His own spokesman, Shaun Kenney, eventually acknowledged the evidence did not establish what Miyares had claimed.
Miyares didn’t correct the record. He changed the formulation and kept attacking the policy.
He lied.
And he got caught.
Credibility is cumulative. So is its loss.
Miyares is particularly fond of accusing his opponents of being unserious about public safety. His retrospective is considerably less interested in what happened inside the public-safety system his own administration was responsible for managing.
On the Youngkin-Miyares watch, Virginia’s prison system blew through its healthcare budget by tens of millions of dollars. To help cover the shortfall, VADOC imposed a hiring freeze and redirected money budgeted for vacant positions toward its medical bills, deliberately leaving prisons understaffed to help pay for the administration’s healthcare overruns.
That decision put correctional officers and incarcerated people alike at greater risk.
Then, on November 17, 2025, Master Corrections Officer Jeremy Lewis Hall went to work at River North Correctional Center and never came home.
Hall was attacked and killed, becoming the first Virginia correctional officer killed in the line of duty in more than 50 years.
That happened on the Youngkin-Miyares watch, too.
Hall’s widow has since sued VADOC leadership, alleging critical staffing shortages and “deliberate indifference” to known risks. She has also publicly raised concerns about communication failures and the lack of support she received from the agency her husband died serving.
That, too, is part of the “Virginia Renaissance.”
I would never claim that the hiring freeze killed Jeremy Hall. The evidence does not establish that, and his service deserves better than being reduced to somebody else’s campaign statistic.
But that is precisely the standard Miyares refused to apply when the deaths belonged to someone else.
The same method runs through Miyares’s retelling of the Youngkin record. He credits Youngkin for favorable economic developments influenced by national trends and federal investment, then assigns Governor Spanberger responsibility for every unfavorable announcement on her watch.
Different issue, same technique: remove the context, choose the most frightening description available and trust that nobody examines the facts.
Perhaps that is what makes Miyares’s post-election reinvention so strange. He seems determined to cast the Youngkin years as a lost conservative golden age and himself as its heir; a sort of Cuban-American Ronald Reagan waiting for history to recognize him.
When Dan Quayle invoked John F. Kennedy during the 1988 vice-presidential debate, Lloyd Bentsen famously responded: “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
Jason Miyares is no Ronald Reagan.
Reagan won 49 states.
Miyares couldn’t win Virginia.
Reasonable Virginians can disagree about taxes, energy, immigration and criminal justice. Those debates deserve accurate facts and honest descriptions of what policies actually do.
Governor Spanberger should be judged on whether her policies make Virginia safer, more affordable and more prosperous. She will make decisions that deserve criticism, and voters should demand results.
But the same standard applies to Youngkin and Miyares.
Perhaps that is why the Miyares “Virginia Renaissance” never caught on much beyond Twitter monologues and fringe opinion pages. A renaissance is ordinarily something people recognize without politicians repeatedly instructing them to call it one.
Ultimately, though, voters render the verdict.
They rendered one in November.
In 2021, Miyares squeaked into office by less than one point. Four years later, Virginians rejected him by more than six, and elected Abigail Spanberger by the largest raw-vote margin in the history of Virginia gubernatorial elections.
Jason Miyares asked Virginians to judge his record and give him another four years as attorney general.
More than 1.8 million people voted to give the job to someone else.
In ordinary language, he was fired.
Now he is attempting to overturn rhetorically the verdict he could not avoid electorally, rebranding the record voters rejected and insisting their answer meant something other than what it plainly did.
Miyares keeps calling it a renaissance.
Virginia voters called it grounds for termination.
The former attorney general is entitled to dislike that verdict. He is even entitled to keep calling four years of Youngkin-Miyares government a “Virginia Renaissance.”
But he is not entitled to rewrite the record and pretend Virginians have not already been asked what we thought of it.
We were.
And we answered.
Shawn Weneta is the Legislative Liaison for The Humanization Project. He can be reached at shawn@thehumanizationproject.org
