Eric Cantor’s primary loss last night
took Washington by surprise. Almost no one saw it coming, not even
Cantor. Throughout the campaign, the Republican House Majority
Leader, who represents Virginia’s seventh congressional district,
denied there was any chance he would lose. He apparently seemed
jovial and “happy-go-lucky” at a big-ticket fundraiser just
yesterday morning, like someone who’d just seen news that his
victory was assured,
according to a source of Breitbart’s Jonathan Strong.
Cantor certainly took the race seriously enough, at least in
terms of cash—he placed ads on Fox News in his district, and
outspent opponent Dave Brat by a huge margin, paying more
just for steakhouse dinners than Brat spent on his entire
campaign. Somehow, he still lost.
A successful primary challenge to a leadership candidate is
incredibly rare. The last time a House majority leader was taken
out in a primary was…well, there was no last time. It’s never
happened before. The position was created in 1899.
Because Cantor’s primary loss was such a rare and unexpected
event, there’s no single ready explanation for what happened.
Instead, there are a handful of competing narratives singling out
Cantor’s stance on immigration, his distance from his district’s
concerns, and his coziness with big business interests. Here are
four possible explanations for Cantor’s unexpected loss.
It was about immigration reform and “amnesty”:
This is the argument you’ll likely hear most often. As Strong
writes, the story of the surprise loss “starts, and almost
ends, with immigration.” Much of the Republican base—the people who
turn out for primaries—is dead set against any attempt to reform
the immigration system in a way that legalizes current immigrants,
and Cantor was seen by many as favoring those efforts. Brat, an
economics professor, was a staunch opponent of recent immigration
overhaul proposals,
saying that bringing more people into the country would
“increase the labor supply—and by doing so, lower wage rates for
the working person. He charged Cantor with supporting
“amnesty”—calling
him “the number one cheerleader in Congress for amnesty”—a
charge that Cantor
denied in campaign fliers.
There’s a counterargument here, however, a big part of which
that Cantor was actually the member of GOP leadership least
supportive of immigration reform. As The Washington Post’s
Greg Sargent
argues, Cantor could better be described as an obstacle to
passing an immigration overhaul; Cantor pushed for a vote to
legalize DREAM act eligible immigrants as a way to allow the GOP to
look gentler on immigrants without actually having to pass
wholesale immigration reform. And one poll by Public Policy Polling
(PPP)—which, yes, describes immigration reform in a rosy way and
does not present potential tradeoffs—found that overall Cantor’s
district supports immigration reform.
It was about big business, crony capitalism, and
corporate welfare: Brat made this a major theme of his
insurgent campaign against the majority leader. Back in April,
Politico
reported Brat saying that “if you’re in big business, Eric’s
been very good to you, and he gets a lot of donations because of
that, right? Very powerful. Very good at fundraising because he
favors big business. But when you’re favoring artificially big
business, someone’s paying the tab for that. Someone’s paying the
price for that, and guess who that is? You.”
Brat hammered Cantor for corporatist tendencies and big business
connections in speeches. You can watch one in full here (via
Zaid Jilani):
It was about local-level constituent service:
One thing is pretty clear—Cantor’s district, as a whole, didn’t
much like him. In the PPP
poll mentioned earlier, 63 percent of residents said they
disapproved of the job that Cantor was doing in Congress, while
just 30 percent approved. This is a district that leans heavily GOP
and has voted for Cantor since 2001. But some reports suggest that
locals were increasingly frustrated with Cantor’s ambitious climb
up the GOP leadership ladder, believing that it made Cantor a worse
representative of local interests. As Jeff Schapiro of the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
wrote in his report on the loss, “Cantor’s maneuvering on
immigration was illustrative of a larger issue: a perception within
Republican circles that Cantor, in his determination to succeed
John Boehner as speaker, seemed more interested in positioning for
the next phase of the nonstop news cycle than embracing a distinct
agenda. Political writer Robert Tracinski, who lives in Cantor’s
district, makes a similar point in a piece
for The Federalist:
It’s a strongly Republican district that spans across a very
conservative stretch of rural Central Virginia, from the Richmond
suburbs to Culpeper. So what were we going to do, vote for a
Democrat? No, we were going to vote for Cantor.And Cantor knew it. Because he didn’t have to worry too much
about getting re-elected every two years, his political ambition
was channeled into rising through the hierarchy of the House
leadership. Rise he did, all the way up to the #2 spot, and he was
waiting in the wings to become Speaker of the House.The result was that Cantor’s real constituency wasn’t the folks
back home. His constituency was the Republican leadership and the
Republican establishment. That’s who he really answered to.
It was about reform conservatism: Cantor
recently appeared at a big confab hosted by the American Enterprise
Institute on Room to Grow, the YG Network’s new book of
conservative reform proposals, which leads Vox’s Ezra Klein to
argue that Cantor’s loss is bad news this brand of wonkier,
policy-pushing conservatism: “Cantor, a founding member of the
‘Young Guns,’ was one of reform conservatism’s patron saints. His
loss suggests reform conservatism doesn’t have much of a
constituency, even among Republican primary voters. The Republican
base, at least in Cantor’s district, isn’t in the mood for
technocratic solutionism. It’s still angry, and it still believes
that any accommodation is too much accommodation.”
My guess is that it’s mostly some combination of the first
three—that immigration anger played a role, that Brat’s
arguments about corporate connections resonated, and that part of
the reason they resonated is that residents of Cantor’s district
felt like he had creature of Republican leadership rather than a
representative of Virginia’s seventh district. But given how
unexpected this was to practically everyone, I don’t have too much
confidence in any of the explanations. If it was clear and obvious,
then more people would have seen it coming.
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