With Less Than 2 Months To Election Day, Winsome Sears Shakes Up Staff

With early voting starting next week and less than two months until Election Day, Virginia Scope is reporting that GOP Lieutenant Governor nominee Winsome Sears has fired her campaign manager and several members of her staff:

“Like any campaign, we have to make strategic decisions that best position us for victory,” said Tucker Davis, a senior advisor to Sears. “We are focused on running a lean campaign over the next 55 days, and using all of our resources to get our message out to voters.”

An anonymous source with intimate knowledge of the situation says that the campaign manager for Sears, C.J. Jordan, was included among the staff terminations. Jordan has not responded to Virginia Scope.

The terminated staff was notified by an email from a law firm, according to Mike Allers, the former press secretary for Sears. They were not given a reason.

Close sources with knowledge of the inner workings of the campaign say that the Republican consulting firm Creative Direct was hired recently and is running the campaign now.

This is the second time that Sears has seen a complete staff turnover on her lieutenant governor campaign — the first being after winning the convention earlier this summer.

An August poll from Monmouth University shows Sears trailing Democratic nominee Hala Ayala by just one point. Ayala has had a fundraising advantage over Sears, raising $1.5 million to Sears’s $750,000 as of June 30th, but only $376k cash-on-hand compared to Sears’s $214k.

Early voting for Virginia’s November 2nd elections begins on September 17th.