Corey Stewart on Senate loss: ‘I’m campaigned out’

WOODBRIDGE — Prince William County wasn’t kind to Corey Stewart.

The electorate there overwhelming Tuesday chose the Democrat Tim Kaine over the Republican in the race for U.S. Senate.

Stewart lost Prince William County — where he’s been Chairman At-large of the Board of Supervisors for the past 12 years – by a staggering 29 points. Statewide, he lost the election to Kaine by 15 points, earning just 35 percent of the vote.

The Prince William numbers were surprising. During his 2017 state gubernatorial Primary Election, he lost, barely, to Republican Ed Gillespie. He easily won Prince William County, and nearly clinched the nomination, losing by about 4,500 votes.

In a General Election for Supervisor in 2015, Stewart beat Rick Smith, the Democrat who ran against him, by 9,300 votes.

Voters, this time, weren’t buying what he was selling. In his concession speech Tuesday night, he described this mid-term election as a headwind too difficult to overcome.

Fighting more than the so-called “blue wave” against President Trump — a man Stewart has so closely aligned himself with — Stewart was also fighting to overcome his association with symbols like the Confederate battle flag. Used by the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate blacks and other minorities during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Stewart in 2017 made several appearances with the flag when campaigning for governor in the southwest portion of the state, proclaiming the flag a symbol of southern heritage, not hate.

Stewart, who made a political name for himself in 2007 on the illegal immigration issue, also spent a lot of time this campaign clarifying his stance on the issue. Even at a press conference following his concession speech, Stewart reiterated for a reporter that he supports legal immigration to the U.S. It’s those who cross the border illegally that he, like President Trump, has vowed to combat.

Overall, Stewart admits he’s tired. His political future in Prince William County, or anywhere for that matter, is uncertain.

“I’ve been campaigning for four years… I’ve been chairman for 12 years. That’s a long, long time,” he said.

His Chairman seat is up in 2019, and he would not commit Tuesday night to run for reelection. That’s a stark contrast to the Corey Stewart of the past — a man who’s gained a reputation, for better or for worse, as a hard-charging, tough-talking Republican whose ready to take on his opponents at every turn, doing and saying anything to win.

While Trump didn’t come to Virginia to stump for him, Stewart says he still supports the president and wants to help him find a way to win reelection in 2020. He estimates that if the president had come, that it might have helped him add two, maybe three points to his vote totals, but added it wouldn’t be “enough to make up for what I lost by.”

Afterward, Stewart greeted his supporters, thanking each one personally while sipping a margarita. 

“I’m campaigned out. I think I want to go to some Caribbean island someplace,” he said.