| Demise |
06-10-2014 08:51 PM |
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor loses his primary.
Not exactly immigration related. But with Cantor as a lame duck who knows what can happen this congress?
Quote:
RICHMOND, Va. — It wasn’t enough that Eric Cantor spent $1 million in the weeks leading up to the election, when his conservative foe hardly had $100,000 in his campaign coffers.
It didn’t matter that the House majority leader, 51, branded Dave Brat a liberal hack, and himself as the guardian of the Republican creed. On Tuesday night, Cantor, who was swept into power on a tea party wave, was swept out by the same movement.
Around 8 p.m., the Associated Press pronounced Cantor’s 13-year political career over. Cantor lost the primary to Brat — a university professor who will now be the GOP nominee for the 7th district of Virginia. He’ll have a big edge in November in a heavily conservative seat.
Eighty percent of the vote was in, and Brat was up 56 to 44. Cantor’s allies said in the runup to the primary that they expected him to win with more than 60 percent of the vote. For the past few months, his D.C. allies were wondering how big they could goose the margins.
At the Westin here where the victory party was to occur, the crowd was stunned — at one point, a large projector screen showing the results was turned off. Cantor was whisked upstairs.
He appeared on stage around 8:25 p.m. with his wife and political director, Ray Allen. Wearing a red tie and speaking with a raspy voice, Cantor opened his five-minute speech by saying: “Obviously we came up short.”
He thanked his family for supporting him during a two-decade career, and said serving as a congressman and majority leader was “one of the highest honors of my life.”
“What I set out to do, and what the agenda that I have always said we’re about is we want to create a Virginia and America that works for everybody,” Cantor said. ” And we need to focus our efforts as conservatives, as Republicans, on putting forth our conservative solutions so that they can help solve the problems for so many working middle class families that may not have the opportunity that we have.”
Minutes after Cantor left, immigration protestors stormed the ballroom to push for reform. Cantor was gone — he had been whisked into a black SUV with his wife.
It’s one of the most stunning losses in modern House politics, and completely upends the GOP hierarchy in Virginia and Washington. Cantor enjoyed a meteoric rise that took him from chief deputy whip, to minority whip to majority leader in the span of 13 years. He had long been seen as John Boehner’s successor as speaker.
The loss will ripple across Washington, too: from political consultants who worked for Cantor to his aides who decamped for K Street, there will be reverberations.
Cantor is the second House incumbent to lose this primary season — Texas GOP incumbent Ralph Hall was defeated by a tea-party backed challenger at the end of May.
There were warning signs that kept piling up. In April, Brat supporters vastly outnumbered Cantor allies at local GOP meetings. Then in May, tea party fueled activists knocked off Cantor’s choice for local GOP chair in Cantor’s home base of Henrico County. But Cantor’s aides consistently brushed off the challenge, telling reporters and fellow GOP aides that the contest didn’t merit the media coverage it was getting
Brat severely trailed in fundraising, pulling in $200,000 this cycle compared to Cantor’s $2 million.
But Cantor took the primary challenge seriously.
He held nothing back in April and May: the incumbent spent more than $120,000 printing campaign mailers, $13,000 on yard signs, $370,000 in campaign ads and $30,000 on polling.
National Republicans turned out door-knockers – Cantor’s entire political operation was thrust into full throttle. He was trying to set an example, his allies say. Instead, he became an example.
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Source:
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/0...ia-107683.html |
