Corey Stewart, Republican Senate candidate from Virginia in the 2018 midterm election, looked at the Virginia governor’s race on Tuesday morning’s edition of Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM hosts Alex Marlow, Raheem Kassam, and Steve Bannon.

“About ten days ago, Gillespie was way down in the polls. All these polls had him down by at least eight points, or down by ten,” Stewart noted.

“As Ed campaigned and became more Trumpian, he has more embraced the Trump agenda, it looks a lot like the campaign that I ran against him, frankly – running on issues such as protection of historical monuments, cracking down on MS-13 and other illegal alien criminals, and starting to embrace a little bit of the president but not completely,” he said, referring to his race against Gillespie for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

“As he’s done that, his poll numbers have come way up. The RealClearPolitics average has him down by a little bit more than three points, which is a dramatic improvement, but he does seem to have some momentum on his side at this point,” Stewart said.

Bannon asked why the Trump agenda was so important to the Commonwealth.

“It’s important to remember that Virginia, we did lose it in 2016, but not by much,” Stewart replied. “At the end of the campaign, the campaign made the decision to really kind of focus the resources – and probably rightly so – on Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio. But Virginia could have been won.”

“And so the indication this year, this is really the only competitive election in 2017, was what happened in 2016 – was that an aberration, was it a one-time thing? Or was it the beginning of a big movement that’s bigger than Trump himself, bigger than the presidency?” he asked. “That’s really what is at stake today here in Virginia.”

Bannon asked why immigration was such a hot issue in Virginia.

“I don’t think people realize just how much illegal immigration affects the states that are not on the border,” Stewart replied. “Virginia has had a problem with illegal immigration for at least a couple of decades. Ten years ago, I led the biggest crackdown on illegal immigration in the country in Prince William County, which is in northern Virginia, a Democratic stronghold. I’ve been governing that county for ten years, and I’ve been getting re-elected largely based upon that issue because people are upset with illegal aliens coming in here and committing crimes.”

“This transcends political boundaries. This transcends racial lines,” he argued. “People believe that if somebody is in the country illegally, and they commit a crime, they should be deported. In Virginia, you’ve got this MS-13 gang. Eigthy percent of the members are illegal aliens, and they’ve been committing heinous crimes not just in northern Virginia, but in the other major area of Virginia, the Tidewater area where Virginia Beach is. Just recently, up and down the 81 corridor and in rural parts of the state, MS-13 has really been gaining ground and committing murders and other heinous crimes across the western part of Virginia as well.”

Stewart charged that Democrats cannot answer tough questions about MS-13 and illegal alien crime because “they know that people are upset about it, and they’ve got the left wing of their base that they’re trying to placate, the Bernie Sanders wing.”

“They’re trying to have this balancing act, trying to figure out a way to placate the far left and try to keep your more moderate Democrats in line. It’s not going to work,” he predicted. “The way we know that is, this left-wing group called the Latino Victory Fund ran this ad which is the biggest gift to Ed Gillespie and the Republicans of Virginia, and it was probably the dumbest move by liberals in the past year. They ran this ad where you’ve got this white guy in a pickup truck flying the Gadsden flag, flying the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag, trying to run down minority children.”

“If Gillespie didn’t have momentum behind him at the beginning of that ad, he certainly has it now, even though he’s kind of a boring candidate, to be truthful,” Stewart said. “This ad has really ginned up not just opposition to the Democrats by Republicans, but from working-class people across the state.”

“It’s important just to get out there and vote,” he stressed. “At this point, you can just go to the State Board of Elections website to figure out where to vote, if people don’t know.”

“Let me just finish with this, and that is that what happens in Virginia in 2017 – if we win this state, or even if we come close today, it does set the stage for knocking out Tim Kaine in 2018 during my race for the Senate,” Stewart said. “It’s so important not just for who is governor of Virginia, but who is going to be the next U.S. senator from Virginia.”

“The problem that Tim Kaine’s got, his son is a member of Antifa,” he added. “His son was arrested in Minneapolis for disguising himself, putting on a hood and everything else, and then trying to flee arrest. Tim Kaine, instead of saying, ‘Well, my son made a mistake,’ he, instead, said, ‘Well, I’m proud that my son was involved in politics.’ His son was attacking law-abiding Trump supporters in Minneapolis!”

“You’ve got Kaine who wants to be seen as somewhat of a non-partisan figure, but when he ran for vice president, all that came unraveled, and people see him for the far-left politician that he is,” Stewart declared.

“Democrats have this civil war. You’ve got this book that’s being published today by Donna Brazile, and let me say that in Virginia, this division between the Bernie Sanders wing and the Hillary Clinton/Kaine wing of the party, the establishment part of the Democratic Party – it’s all coming unraveled. The Democratic Party, if it loses today, there are going to be even more recriminations and infighting among Democrats,” he predicted.

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.

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