'Gonna be your turn': Clip surfaces of Republican's chilling message to abortion activists

A newly-revealed voice clip of Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, currently running for governor, appears to depict her delivering a dark message to supporters of abortion rights.

The clip, posted to X on Wednesday by the liberal network Meidas Touch, came from a 2022 interview between Earle-Sears and John Reid, then a talk radio host. Reid is now himself the GOP's candidate for lieutenant governor, whose own campaign spent much of the summer in turmoil.

"Let's not talk about what's happening with Ukraine," said Earle-Sears in the clip. "When you are willing to kill a child up until the day that the baby could be born, go get thee a mirror and ask yourself if you're okay with this kind of thing. I don't care whether you're Libertarian, Democrat, Reform Party, Green. I don't care who you are. Murder is murder. And one day, it's going to be your turn."

The comment from Sears, who has been struggling to overcome a polling deficit against her Democratic rival, former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, was immediately promoted by the Virginia Democratic Party.

All of this comes amid a number of other last-minute shakeups in the Virginia elections, where early voting is already underway.

Earlier in the month, the race was also rocked by revelations that in 2022, Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones fantasized in private text messages about former Republican state House Speaker Todd Gilbert getting "two bullets to the head" — a comment for which he immediately issued an apology both to the public and to Gilbert's family.

Virginia is broadly seen by both parties as a critical testing ground for public anger against the Trump administration, as a Democratic-leaning but sometimes competitive state dominated by the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where Trump administration cuts and mass purges of the civil service have hit the community particularly hard.