On the last day of early voting, Newport News Mayor Phil Jones posted outside of Denbigh Community Center with his family to greet voters.
He said hello to almost every passerby, or thanked them for voting. For the ones wearing a sports team jersey, he made sure to ask how their team would do. For those who wanted it, he jumped in on selfies.
“You're doing a great job,” one woman told Jones. “I can't go in here and vote enough. I can't press my pencil hard enough. I can't circle it hard enough … We talk about it all the time, we say, ‘That young man is really doing a great job.’”
Last week, Jones won a second term as Newport News’ mayor with 70% of the vote.
He claims he’s focused on the next four years. But signs point to bigger political ambitions.
Jones, a U.S. Naval Academy grad and former Marine Corps officer, is a planner. He started talking to loved ones about becoming Newport News’ mayor as early as 2015, and he has a clear list of priorities for his second mayoral term.
Jones casually mentions his impressive network of contacts, like former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Texas senator-elect James Talarico. He met Elaine Luria and Governor Abigail Spanberger in 2018 and has stayed in touch with both as their political careers progressed.
Jones said he met much of his political network while getting his master’s degree in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
He leaned on some of them to convince voters he’s the best person to lead Newport News for another four years. Longtime U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott campaigned alongside him this year, and Buttigieg flew in to lend his support too.
“I'm very excited to see you earn a second term as mayor,” Buttigieg told Jones at an October roundtable in Newport News. “But also just want to say how much I have enjoyed watching your leadership, where you led this community.”
In 2022, Jones started a political action committee, Good News. It’s a play on one of Newport News’ least flattering nicknames.
“For a long time, Newport News has been called ‘Bad News’, and I feel like other cities look down on it,” Jones said. “They look down on the leadership. They look down on the people. And I'm just so proud to be a part of this community.”
So far, the PAC has primarily been used for Jones’ mayoral campaigns. Since it started, it’s brought in just under $793,000 – most from Jones’ other campaign committee, and $175,000 from Dominion Energy.
Jones said he’s not sure what could come after mayoral service, despite the political infrastructure around him.
“I'll say this: I gave my 20s to the Marine Corps. I'm going to give my 30s to Newport News,” the 37-year-old said.
Picking up a family legacy
Jones said his decision to go into politics came in 2015.
His cousin, Clementa Pinckney, was a state senator in South Carolina. “I can remember as a young kid going to the state house and, like, hanging out in his office,” Jones said.
In 2015, Pinckney was leading Bible study at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church - the city’s oldest Black church- when a white man entered the building and shot and killed Pinckney and nine others.
Weeks later, South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from its state capitol, with then-Gov. Nikki Haley changed her mind about the flag’s placement because of the racially motivated church shooting.
“I was like, ‘OK, this is what one man's life can do,’” Jones said at an October event with the shipyard’s union. “My cousin … made such a big impact in his community that I wanted to have something very similar back here in Newport News.”
Jones decided then he wouldn’t stay in the military once his service commitment ended. He planned to go to Harvard’s Kennedy School to learn more about public policy before deciding to run for public office.
“I've had a certain level of privilege and that people have invested into my life, and what is a man who doesn't change the world?” Jones said. “Whatever gifts or skills that have been invested, I just want to turn around and invest in my community.”
At first, Jones wasn’t sure what “going into politics” would mean. By the time he met Dr. Jamila Wynter, his now-wife, while they attended school in Boston, he knew he wanted to do something back home.
“On our first date … he said to me, ‘I want to go back to my hometown and make a difference, and I think I may actually want to be mayor,’” Wynter said.
“And the first thing I actually said was, ‘Well, where's your hometown?’ And he said, ‘Newport News.’ And I said, ‘Where's Newport News?’”
The two did go back to Newport News, and Jones secured a job as Hampton University’s
Associate Vice President for Institutional Effectiveness and Strategic Planning. In his political career, he started to learn some of the difficulties of being a new face on the political scene.
While he knew political up-and-comers around the country from various programs and his Harvard network, he found it difficult to make inroads with the power players on the Peninsula — many of whom are related by blood and longtime political allies.
Notably, former Mayor McKinley Price and U.S. Rep. Scott (who are brothers-in-law) didn’t endorse Jones during his first campaign.
He won as an outsider, becoming the city’s youngest ever elected mayor.
“I was sort of the new kid on the block, but I think it goes back to … showing up day in and day out,” he said. “It's hard to doubt someone's dedication and tenacity. I just show up every single day, and I think that's gone a long way with them.”
Jones’ chance to show up for the city happened days before he was officially sworn in.
On Jan. 6, 2023, a 6-year-old student at Richneck Elementary School brought a gun to school and shot his teacher, Abby Zwerner.
The shooting received international attention. Even though Jones wasn’t technically the mayor, he appeared at press conferences, made statements to the press, and began comforting Zwerner’s family.
“The Marine Corps taught me that leaders should be at the point of friction, and the point of friction for my city that entire week was Richneck, and so as a Marine, you sort of head toward gunfire,” he said.
In the year that followed, Jones and City Council worked with the school board to add more security at schools.
Gary Hunter has been on the Newport News School Board for 12 years. He’s seen the relationship between the board he serves on and City Council wax and wane.
After Richneck, he said Jones’ leadership helped strengthen the cooperation between the two boards.
“He brought the city and the school together,” Hunter said. “Once we found where some weaknesses were, the city came in and gave us extra money in order to do the things that we need to do to make sure that our buildings are safe.”
Hunter, who lost reelection this year, is also Jones’ neighbor and works with him at Hampton University. He’s been impressed with the mayor’s ability to bring city departments together to address other issues. As a resident, he’s also liked seeing the city’s crime rate fall and has been happy with Jones’ approach to working with the school system.
“I think he’s led our city to an unbelievable place,” Hunter said.
“He's been able, as a leader, to get with our leader on the school board and become one. … We all come together for the betterment of the city and for our students.”
The Richneck shooting wasn’t the only tragedy Jones had to confront as a first-time mayor.
He spent six years in the Marines, so he was intimately aware of the difficult conditions some young service members live in.
Sailors stationed at the Newport News Shipyard struggled with poor housing conditions during the months their ships were docked for maintenance. Several service members, including one of Jones’ personal friends, died by suicide while stationed there from 2017-2022.
The Navy responded with a number of changes, like offering WiFi on ships in maintenance and allowing different processes to seek mental health care. The biggest one is a $1.7 billion effort to privatize barracks in the region to give young sailors better housing options. Newport News is helping to finance the project with a $40 million forgivable loan from the state, but leaders have a limited role in what the final development will look like.
Two residential towers in downtown Newport News will be constructed as part of the plan.
“It's more than just a political thing,” Jones said. “It's like, one of my friends committed suicide. What can we do to increase quality of life? He was a Naval Academy graduate, lieutenant in the Navy, and he did this.”
Much of the military housing project depends on federal and state funding and processes. One thing that lies squarely with Jones, according to him, is the city’s homicide rate.
“That’s not just numbers; those are lives that are saved, predominantly of young African American men,” said Jones, who makes a point to attend memorial services of gun violence victims in the city.
“I call it extreme ownership,” he said. “I really feel like if anything bad happens in the city, it’s my fault, even if it’s not mine. … And so when young Black men get killed, I feel it. I call their mother. I show up at the funeral. That’s not a political thing. That’s just showing up when someone needs you.”
Jones said at the 2024 State of the City address that he wanted to reduce homicides by 15% by 2026. He announced the creation of the city’s Office of Community Safety during that speech, which completed Newport News’ first-ever community safety plan earlier this year.
The number of homicides in Newport News hit a five-year low in 2023, with 47 homicides in the city, according to the police department’s annual reports. Most violent crime in Virginia and the country decreased during this time.
In 2025, the most recent year available, the number fell to 18 – a 61% decrease from two years before.
As Jones looks toward his next four years as mayor, he has a list that he thinks will keep him busy: work to keep the homicide numbers low, support the Navy’s housing project, figure out the next era of the Newport News-Williamsburg airport, address aging school buildings and move the municipal offices to City Center.
“That's four years, that's more than enough,” Jones said.
Jones said he’s making plans now four years at a time. He and Wynter have a one-year-old son, and a daughter due any day to factor into their decisions.
Jones said regardless of what he or his wife decide to do, his kids will attend Newport News Public Schools.
Wynter, who is a gastroenterologist at Riverside Health, said she’s looking forward to whatever path her family ends up on.
“I never thought I would be with a politician … but it's been a blessing and a journey with its ups and downs,” Wynter said.
Her husband, she added, “has a vision for not only Newport News but our community and society … and I feel like those are the type of people we need in politics, so I encourage him every step of the way.”
