Sen. Tim Kaine has won reelection to his third term as the junior U.S. senator from Virginia.
The Democrat defeated Republican challenger Hung Cao in Tuesday’s election.
Cao is a 25-year Navy veteran who had the endorsement of former President Donald Trump.
“Thank you so much for putting your faith in me,” Kaine told supporters at a speech in Richmond Tuesday night. “And you may or may not, over the course of the next six years, agree or disagree with this or that. But I won’t embarrass you. I won’t let you down. I won’t cause you to lose a moment of sleep. And we will keep moving Virginia and this country forward.”
See Kaine’s acceptance speech below:
“I want to tell you this, though, we moved the heck out of that needle. Virginia is not blue, if anything it’s purple,” Cao said. At the time of Cao’s post, Kaine was leading Cao by about 8 percentage points, with about 87% of the votes counted.
Political observers said Cao faced an uphill battle. That’s because of Virginia’s moderate electorate, aversion to Trump and Kaine’s salience with voters. Kaine won his 2018 race by 16 percentage points.
Virginia hasn’t elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate since 2002. That’s when the centrist John Warner won his final term.
Kaine has won all of his statewide races, including as governor and technically as a vice presidential candidate in 2016, when he and Hillary Clinton carried the Commonwealth but lost the general election to Trump and Mike Pence.
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