At some level, I just plain enjoy GOP House Leader Eric Cantor losing the Republican primary, even though his Tea Party opponent David Brat is as awful as you’d expect. But even though I don’t like the David or the Goliath, I can’t help but enjoy seeing David win. Ezra Klein has a good take on what this means for the Tea Party’s power:
Mere weeks ago the press was writing the Tea Party’s obituary. Tonight, the Tea Party claimed its single biggest scalp. This speaks to the weird way the Tea Party exerts powers.
The power of the Tea Party has never been the number of Republicans it defeated in primaries. The overwhelming majority of Republican incumbents running for reelection win their primaries without trouble. Rather, it’s been the prominence of the Republicans the Tea Party defeated that give the movement its sway. Dick Lugar, Mike Castle, and Bob Bennett. They were institutions. And Eric Cantor’s loss is a nearly an unprecedented event in American politics. These losses mean no Republican is safe. And that means that as rare as successful Tea Party challenges are, every elected Republicans needs to guard against them.
David Brat’s big campaign issue was opposing “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants, which (Brat said) Cantor was for.
Of course, Brat’s win kills immigration reform dead for the forseeable future, say lots of stupid pundits who somehow failed to notice that it’s been dead for weeks.
Also, Cantor is the sole Jewish Republican in Congress. In fact, he’s the only GOP congresscritter who isn’t a Christian. I don’t think that influenced Virginia primary voters – but I do think it says something about the narrowness of the modern GOP.
Hey, you know who’s completely unprepared for this? The Democrats. David Brat is far more vulnerable in a general election than Cantor was. But the Democrat running against Brat – Jack Trammell (Trammel and Brat are professors at the same college) – is amateur hour, if his website is any indication (screenshot for posterity). The website features, among other things, a nonworking “twitter” button, a nonworking “LinkedIn” button (why?), a nonworking “Donate” button (What the fuck!), three footer links going nowhere (named “footer link 1” and so on), and a disturbing lack of paragraph breaks.
Should be a fun election.
Looks like Trammell’s website has been updates, but the new one isn’t that much better. I mean, it got rid of the obvious problems, but it’s still just one page, with a three-paragraph biography of Trammell that reads like it was written by an eighth grader.
The Tea Party movement is just that – a movement. It’s not a political party in the sense that the Democrats and Republicans are, nor have they really meant to be. It doesn’t hold conventions, it doesn’t slate candidates as an independent entity. What it does, as reflected in your comment
is to hold the GOP to adhere more closely to conservative principles. The number of candidates who beat mainstream GOP candidates is minimal. The number of mainstream GOP candidates who have had to adopt more conservative positions in order to retain their seats is large, though. Those actions count as Tea Party movement victories.
Which means, BTW, that your comment “No Republican is safe” is not actually true. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and other candidates who hold similar views regarding fiscal responsibility and the proper disposition and use of governmental powers are strongly supported by the Tea Party and would appear to be quite safe. It’s only those Republicans who oppose conservative principles who have something to worry about.
Scott is also black, as are other Tea Party movement supported office holders and candidates, which kind of puts the lie to
and the charges of “racism” against the Tea Party movement.
I don’t know whether the MSM’s failure to acknowledge what I wrote above is because they don’t understand it, or because they understand it very well and are doing whatever they can to fight it.
Oh, my, my. Oh, hell yes.
This also puts a new light on all the commentary about the influence of money on politics. Eric Cantor spent $5,000,000+ on his campaign. Dave Brat, an economics professor, spent about $200,000 on his. Cantor’s steakhouse bills were almost as much as Brat’s entire campaign.
There are exceptions to every rule, RonF. Does a huge monetary advantage over your opponent create a guarantee for your campaign? Of course not. But it is a huge advantage. Once every very rare while you get an upset. Usually because, as in this case, the big money campaign was atrociously run. When your internal polling is off by 40 points, you’ve got problems that even incredible sums of money will find hard to overcome.
Oh, it doesn’t change the fact that a lot of money gives you an advantage. But it casts a new light on it. It shows that there are ways of getting one’s message out without a lot of money, that there are messages that will overcome a big money disadvantage – and, as you point out, there are ways to absolutely blow a big money advantage through incompetence. Candidates who are running for office are going to study this closely. The summaries that I am seeing basically state that Eric Cantor was so busy running for Speaker that he forgot he was running for his seat.
Well, there’s a reasonable amount of evidence that money has only a small effect in election results. (It’s hard to tease out, partially because money is a sign of success as much as a cause.) Its largest effect seems to be in determining who can run at all, rather than whether they’ll win once they do.
The salient point is not that money buys elections, it’s that candidates believe money buys elections. And as long as they believe that, many candidates will pander to the highest donors.
In this particular case, I’m not so pleased. David winning is a sign of the continued trend of the Republican constituency moving to the right. And as the constituency moves, so move the candidates. I mean, eventually they’ll either move so far right that they no longer wield any national power, or they’ll come back closer to the center. But the damage they’re doing in the meantime is enormous.
Did the GOP constituency move to the right? Or did the GOP politicians move to the left, and the constituency finally got sick of it enough to do something about it? It’s long been known that there’s a lag between political and governmental forms going away from the will of the people and the people actually doing something about it.
Fair point: it’s a hard (and probably pointless) metric to talk about the overall trends in the level of conservatism of a population. When are we comparing to? and are we comparing to a fixed standard or to the societal median? and which issues do we care about?
I think it’s safe to say, for example, that in absolute terms the average GOP member has moved to the left on immigration and gay rights in the last 20 years, while moving to the right on gun control, the environment, and governmental support of the poor, and not moving very much on general economic principles. In fact, have a bunch of charts to this effect.
(There’s also that recent study showing that both Democratic and Republican politicians believe their constituents are more conservative than they really are, which would refute your point as well in general, though it may have been a factor in this race in particular.)