CANTOR DOWN! — Why the Death of the Tea Party Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

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Republican Majority Leader Cantor, and next in line to replace the current House Speaker, lost his Republican primary by 10%. The following voter turn out numbers pretty much say it all as to why.

In 2012 Majority Leader Cantor won 79% of a total of 47,037 votes cast in his Republican primary election, 37,369 for him.

Yesterday there were 65,008 votes cast in the VA 7th District Republican primary and Cantor’s opponent got 56% or roughly 36,500 votes.

College professor David Brat both brought in approximately 18,000 more new grassroots Republican primary voters, while he also pulled a small number of Cantor’s 2012 voters to win.

This is why Cantor’s pollster was so wrong. With all the modern polling tools that $5 million and a 10-to-1 money advantage can buy, all polls are built upon a “turn out model,” an educated guess really, as to who will show up on election day based on past data. If the guess is wrong, so is the poll…and so is the media coverage based upon those “insider candidate polls.” Cantor’s pollsters, McLaughlin & Associates, just didn’t see the small town’s worth of new primary voters the Tea Party brought to the table in Virginia’s 7th House District primary election coming.

Establishment Republicans have just been delivered the very stern lesson that when you “do a #2” on your primary base voters in a “safe Republican district,” they can and more importantly *WILL* return the favor…be the issue amnesty or anything else.

15 thoughts on “CANTOR DOWN! — Why the Death of the Tea Party Has Been Greatly Exaggerated”

  1. I love the notion that the voters get to repudiate their representatives but NRO reported that the Democrat Party pushed people to vote in the Republican primary against Cantor. Each state has individualistic voting rules, especially for primaries. They are usually designed to protect incumbents though.

    Anyone have a notion if some of the 18k new voters were crossovers?

  2. If Democrats had the organization in the VA 7th capable of putting in 18K new voters in a Republican primary, they would have a well financed opponent to Cantor, rather than a place holder.

  3. The Tea Party are the Democrats worst nightmare(*) come true. I simply cannot believe they prefer a Tea Party backed candidate to malleable Eric Cantor. That makes no sense at all. I think the Democratic spin miesters are trying to put a smiley face on an earthquake.

    (*) Smaller,less powerful government? The Rule of Law? Less control of American’s lives? Less opportunity for graft, corruption and wielding arbitrary power? Border control? Energy expansion? Aaaahhhhhh! Wake me up! Wake me up!

  4. Summer at Versailles.

    If there is a sudden move it will come from the Bureaucracy [and Finance] from the motive of self-preservation.

  8. If there is a sudden move it will come from the Bureaucracy [and Finance] from the motive of self-preservation.

    Agreed. All systems – and federal bureaucracy is a system – act as lifeforms and will struggle to grow, consume all resources available in order to grow, and all systems have a survival instinct, they will fight to retain life.

    A corollary is that large, complex systems that are failures cannot be patched or made to work. Complex systems have large inertia and will continue failing despite all efforts to change it. Because of it’s complexity, the system itself will resist change. They must be disconnected and replaced with a simple, limited goals system that performs its primary function acceptably well.

  9. “That is a very good article at bull elephant. By the time it was done I was glad that Cantor was gone.”

    Same for me, I was gradually becoming disenchanted with Cantor, but was having a difficult time putting my finger on the specifics that caused me to question his leadership. A very slick operator who got caught playing the game. That may be the applicable national lesson. To be a duck, you have to do more than quack on cue. It is very difficult to follow the inside plays of these political pros. It takes trusted, dedicated and principled watch dogs to lift the vail.

    Bravo to the grassroots in Brat’s district. I hope their example energizes imitation in other places.

    Mike

  10. One more point. The media seems to be pretty much in agreement that the Tea Party has “moved” the Republican Party incumbents “to the right” or words to that effect. Some do so bemoaning this and some applauding it.

    In most cases what is actually being witnesses is their rhetoric being moved to the right. This has happened repeatedly in the past and in the vast majority of the cases, upon re-election their actions have witnessed little to no evidence of any substantive change in their behavior. Just because you teach a dog to quack does not mean it will become a duck. As with Cantor, they will act based on their actual constituency’s values.

    We know this, but many get caught up in the campaign messaging rather than hard-core in depth probing of the candidates DNA.

    Mike

  11. The Democrat party has secretly infiltrated the Republican party. Infiltration is a standard political tactic which Lenin pioneered and about which he has written many letters.

    We cannot have 2 party government as long as one party controls both parties. What we have today is one party rule and the rapid development of surveillance and enforcement tools vital to a totalitarian state.

  12. “What we have today is one party rule and the rapid development of surveillance and enforcement tools vital to a totalitarian state.”

    The one party is the Ruling Party and it is antithetical to the “Country Party” another name for the Tea Party.

    Interesting times.

  13. Tom Sullivan really hit something on target I think – we are on the verge of a middle class rebellion –

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