As we focus on the start of the 2024 presidential election cycle, we’d better make sure to take note of the 2023 election. Four states will go to the polls in November for legislative elections, where all seats in eight chambers will be up for grabs: Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia. (Also, three states will have gubernatorial elections in November — Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi.)

No legislative fight may be more meaningful than the one brewing in Virginia, where both chambers are narrowly split. The GOP controls the state’s constitutional offices and the lower chamber, thanks to Glenn Youngkin’s sweep in 2021 and the power of the parental-rights movement. The upper chamber remains in Democrat control (22-18), but Juan Pablo Segura and his allies hope to change that, starting Virginia’s 31st Senate district.

It won’t be easy to wrest control of this district from Democrats. The district got redrawn two years ago to reduce the influence of Washington DC in this Northern Virginia district, but it still includes DC-adjacent Arlington and Langley. Democrat incumbent Barbara Favola will have to run in District 40 this year, however, which gives Segura and the GOP a unique opportunity to pick up a seat and get that much closer to control of the district.

District 31 also includes Loudoun County, an epicenter of the parental-rights movement in 2021. It has emerged as a battleground again this month, thanks to the threats of violence against parental-rights activists by a group called Loudoun Love Warriors, some of whom are connected to Democrat officials:

There is new reaction to 7News’s exclusive reporting that showed how some Loudoun County residents’ lives were threatened in a Facebook group that appears to include members associated with a number of elected officials and candidates.

Members of the Loudoun Love Warriors Facebook group have also tried to get people in trouble with their employers after speaking at school board meetings.

A whistleblower sent 7News a list that allegedly targets more than one hundred people, including elected officials, Cornerstone Chapel church, and its new school that’s expected to open in the county this year.

The group attempted to doxx parents who spoke in opposition to school-board policies, and successfully got at least one of them fired, and targeted at least two others. Their Facebook group had discussions about strategies and tactics to ensure that the dissenters’ lives were “ruined beyond repair.” And at least a few of the LLWs had connections to public officials who could make it happen:

Scott Mineo is a Loudoun County parent who says he was fired after members of the group — who appear to be associated with County Supervisor Juli Briskman, school board member Atoosa Reaser, and County Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj — put pressure on his employer to let him go. Members of the group also reportedly referred Mineo to the FBI, IRS and DHS, he claimed, “all because they don’t like my opinion.” …

The group included campaign volunteers, supporters, and staff for several county elected officials. Members of the group appear to be associated with Biberaj, Briskman, Reaser and other officials, including School Board Chair Ian Serotkin, school board member Brenda Sheridan, school board member Erika Ogedegbe, school board candidate Anne Donohue, sheriff candidate Craig Buckley, and Chair Phyllis Randall.

Last week, I had an opportunity to sit down with Segura for an interview to discuss the election, parental rights, the issue with the LLWs, and more in the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast. It’s the first run for office by Segura, but he feels the need to step up now and fight for sanity.

“This group of radical activists and ideologues were kind of plotting together to target parents that were just simply speaking out and speaking up at school board meetings,” Segura says, “demanding for more accountability, transparency, and just simple things like more safety in the schools.” In response, these radicals “used a real estate system to actually doxx parents,” leading to threats of all kinds. “Some folks were pictured with guns threatening to curb-stomp people. I mean, really really scary stuff.”

One reason Segura wants to run for office and change control of the legislature is to break the connection between the current establishment and the radicals. “The school board right now is controlled by Democrats,” Segura points out, “and the Board of Supervisors is again controlled by some of these radical idealogues. Unfortunately,” Segura laments, “they’re doubling down in this rhetoric of no accountability, no transparency in hiding things from parents.”

The risks in Virginia aren’t just for parents who want a say in their children’s education, Segura says. “This is really why I’m running for the state Senate. To be very honest, you’re just seeing a dangerous trend of ideologues and bureaucrats at the state and local level that are undermining so many of our just such important public institutions,” he tells me.

“Our educational system, you look at, obviously our economy. Their policies and positions and not doing simple things like returning a two billion dollars surplus back to the taxpayers and obviously damaging even our healthcare system and so we need a new generation of leaders. We need people that will stand up and that will fight for parents and fight for common sense in our politics, which is why I’m running for the State Senate.”

There are plenty more highlights in this interview, and good reasons to start engaging in Virginia’s legislative elections now:

• “I never really thought I’d be in this position of running for office, but I just started seeing, like I mentioned earlier, this dangerous trend of ideologues and bureaucrats running and getting elected to state and local political levels and really ruining our schools, ruining our economy, ruining a lot of these core infrastructure things that people rely on, like healthcare.”
• Segura has a track record as an entrepreneur that is both high-tech and deliciously retail. “I just grew up eating donuts after church on Sundays with my buddies,” he says. “I actually tried my 1st artisan donut in New York ten years ago, and it was just it blew my mind. Like 10 million times better than Crispy Cream and Duncan Donuts. And there was no artisan donut company in DC,” Segura continued, “and so I kind of combined the fact that I’m obsessed with donuts with a business opportunity. And we now have five stores in and around the DC area.”
• On gun control: “At the end of the day, a lot of where I think the conversation needs to go around, safety is really making schools safe. And so a lot of what we’ve talked about in the district, in the area is actually making sure that schools are not soft targets. And so for me again, we already have some of the toughest gun laws in Virginia. What we have to do really in the priority if we want to keep our kids safe is making sure that schools aren’t easy targets for some of these crazy people to go after. And so that’s kind of what I’ve been talking a lot about on the ground.”

There’s a lot more, so be sure to watch or listen to it all — especially in Senate District 31.

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!