Corey Stewart (CNS Photo by Katrina Tilbury, via Flickr)

Corey Stewart (CNS Photo by Katrina Tilbury, via Flickr)



By WAMU’s Martin Austermuhle and Patrick Madden

Corey Stewart, the chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors who often refers to himself as “Trump before Trump,” defeated two other Republicans during Tuesday’s Republican primary, setting up an uphill battle to unseat incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine (D) in November.

With almost all precincts reporting, Stewart claimed just shy of 45 percent of the vote, besting Del. Nick Freitas (R-Culpeper), who got 43 percent of the vote. E.W. Jackson, a conservative activist and minister, trailed behind with 12 percent of the vote.

“It’s a lot better to win by 1.4 than lose by 1.2,” joked Stewart after the results were announced, referring to his loss last year in the Republican gubernatorial primary to Ed Gillespie.

Stewart’s victory in the ideologically charged race is something of a redemption for him and his sharp-tongued brand of conservative politics. Last year, he narrowly lost to Gillespie, who was later soundly defeated by Gov. Ralph Northam. Many political analysts pinned Gillespie’s loss on his association with President Donald Trump, but Stewart saw it differently: he called it a “humiliating rejection” of party moderates.

During this year’s Senate Republican primary campaign, Stewart focused on an issue he has promoted in the past: strict limits on immigration. He led a crackdown on illegal immigration in Prince William County a decade ago. Speaking on Tuesday night, he returned to the theme.

“Virginia can choose to continue to let in criminal illegal aliens like MS-13—and by the way they are ‘animals’—or we can arrest them, deport them back to the country they came from, and build the wall!” he said.

Throughout the campaign, Stewart attacked Freitas, a former Green Beret who positioned himself as the establishment candidate, as being not sufficiently conservative enough. In response, Freitas called into question some of Stewart’s associations with individuals and groups who have espoused white nationalist views.

While Stewart’s particular brand of conservatism resonated with Republican primary voters, former Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling expressed disappointment at Stewart’s victory.

With the Republican primary victory in hand, Stewart turns next to challenging incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine (D)—and Stewart has already promised he’ll wage a “vicious” campaign. He still faces tough odds, though: a May poll had Stewart trailing Kaine by 11 percent, and Democratic activists say Northam’s statewide victory last year proved that Trump-style campaigns are likely to fall flat with powerful suburban voters throughout the commonwealth.

But Stewart expressed confidence that he could defeat Kaine, who was Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential candidate in 2016 and before that Virginia’s governor and lieutenant governor.

“We will unite the coalition that President Trump brought together in 2016,” he told a crowd. “We will win working men and women across the state, we will restore our values, we will restore our economy, we will restore our borders, we will restore America.”

This story originally appeared on WAMU.

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