House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his
Republican primary in historically unprecedented fashion yesterday,
and now David Brat, who defeated him, looks set to coast into
victory in November. Virginia’s 7th congressional district, after
all, is heavily Republican. Cantor first won the seat in 2000, with
67 percent of the vote, and with 58 percent of the vote in 2012,
the first election after the most recent redrawing of Virginia’s
congressional districts. It’s not an insurmountable advantage for a
non-Republican, unlike truly single-party districts, but it’s also
not one Jack Trammell, the Democrats’ candidate (who, like Brat, is
a professor at the local Randolph-Macon College) seems equipped to
surmount.
As evidence, take a look at Trammell’s sorry excuse for a
website, which doesn’t include so much as a talking point-laden
issues page. There’s probably been more interest in the 2014 race
in the 7th congressional district, and in Trammell, today alone
than there’s been to-date. Yet nobody in the Democrats’ nationwide
apparatus though to give Trammell’s website a crack makeover last
night in anticipation of the new attention.
Democrats appear to have written off the district in a similar
way to Cantor; they’ve assumed the result. It’s typical of the
two-party duopoly, which has carved out most of the country between
it, leaving just a handful of “battleground” districts and states
over which the two parties compete.
In that context, efforts by the Virginia Libertarian Party to
compete across the state appear to be paying off. For the first
time in its history the party will be fielding a candidate for
eleven out of the twelve federal offices up for election in
November (only the 5th congressional district doesn’t have a
candidate), led by the former gubernatorial candidate
Rob Sarvis running for Senate. In the 7th district, the
candidate is James Carr, whose website suggests
Libertarians are taking that race more seriously than
Democrats.
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