Alice Stewart (1966-2024)

Washington was shaken this week by the sudden and tragic death of the political commentator and veteran media adviser Alice Stewart. Stewart, only 58, had appeared on CNN’s The Situation Room as recently as last Friday. Her body was found the following day in the Belle View neighborhood in northern Virginia. Authorities do not yet know the cause of her death, but they have ruled out foul play.

Stewart was born on March 11, 1966, in Atlanta. An avid football fan and an especially devoted supporter of her Georgia Bulldogs, after graduating from the University of Georgia and working as a local TV reporter in Savannah, Stewart moved to Arkansas, where she worked as a reporter, anchor, and, later, a producer for Little Rock’s NBC affiliate, KARK-4. In the early 2000s, Stewart, while never completely leaving TV behind, began to transition from media to politics. She joined Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s staff as communications director. When Huckabee left office to run for president in 2007, Stewart was one of his presidential campaign’s first hires. Stewart’s shrewd strategizing and media savvy helped Huckabee win the Iowa caucuses and finish second in the delegate count to the eventual Republican nominee, John McCain. “The news of her death has been deeply sobering to me personally and to my family,” Huckabee stated this week.

Stewart’s success in the Huckabee campaign allowed her to secure media positions with subsequent Republican presidential campaigns. She served as communications director for Rick Santorum’s and Michele Bachmann’s campaigns while also working as a communications strategist for then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott. In 2016, Stewart helped Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) become a legitimate contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Under Stewart’s media and communications guidance, Cruz won the Iowa caucuses and 10 other states, finishing as the delegate-count runner-up to eventual nominee Donald Trump.

After the Cruz campaign, Stewart returned to television while branching out to other mediums. In 2016, she began working as a political analyst for CNN, appearing regularly on shows like The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. Although she acknowledged that she had been hired to be one of the network’s conservative voices, Stewart declared that she was “an independent thinker,” not a doctrinaire parrot: “I’m not a Kool-Aid drinker; I’m not a never-Trumper, and I didn’t check my common sense and decency at the door when I voted for [Trump].” Stewart was also a contributor to NPR and the SiriusXM radio show POTUS. In 2020, she launched the Hot Mics From Left to Right podcast with the political commentator and CNN analyst Maria Cardona. Although it faced stiff competition in a media market that now appears to have more podcasts than people, Hot Mics had been gaining traction, recently climbing into the top 100 of Apple’s most downloaded political podcasts.

A sought-after speaker at conferences such as the Learn Right Summit and the Leadership Institute, where she presided over media training for aspiring conservative politicians, Stewart was also a serious runner, most recently completing a Washington, D.C., marathon and the 2023 New York City marathon. She enjoyed botany and gardening, taking pride in cultivating crocuses and other seasonal plants, adored her Shih Tzu, Sammie, and admired Winston Churchill.

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Above and beyond her first-rate political communications acumen, in the all-too-often toxic contemporary political environment, Stewart stood out for her decency, sincerity, honesty, and kindness. A proud Christian and, in Santorum’s words, a “faithful witness to her Savior Jesus,” Stewart’s integrity and geniality made her one of the more well-liked political media professionals on either side of the aisle, which is one of the reasons why her death has affected the Washington political class so deeply. In a tribute to his departed colleague, Wolf Blitzer called her “a very special person.” On CNN Newsroom, Blitzer noted, “We always invited her to come on my show because we knew we would be a little bit smarter at the end of that conversation. She helped our viewers better appreciate what was going on, and that’s why we will miss her so much.”

Another of her CNN colleagues, Dana Bash, described her as “somebody who told it straight,” without histrionics or ad hominem attacks. Still, though, for Bash, as for so many others who were fortunate to cross paths with her, it was her personal qualities that distinguished her. Stewart “brought kindness and support,” Bash said, not only intelligence and expertise. Another media observer remembered how, during political campaigns, she would bring extra food to events for exhausted reporters who could often be too hassled and harried along the campaign trail to grab proper meals. Washington, indeed, has lost one of its truly good ones.

Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published last summer by the University of Alabama Press.