Is there anyone, anywhere who will miss Eric Cantor? More importantly, the Republican strategy of taking immigration “off the table” is now gone with the wind.
So instead of a pseudo reform of immigration (which would not help the people who need help), we will have Republicans competing to insult and demonize the fastest growing demographic group in the electorate.
I’m looking forward to the one hundredth time that Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio are asked why Republican voters hate Hispanics so much.
Did I mention that nobody will miss Eric Cantor? Oh yeah, I guess I did.
Please share widely!
I’ve been celebrating as well, but I wonder if it’s a bit premature.
Initially the first two words that came to my mind were Richard Mourdock. That’s also where a lot of the thought is going on Kos and Mother Jones, but I don’t buy it since the VA CD-7 is fairly non-competitive for any Democrat, but a few scenarios are more realistic:
1) Immigration Reform is dead regardless of whether Cantor won this race or not, so that’s not really a concern. But I agree that the deader it is in the short term, the more likely it is the Hispanic bloc becomes as blue as the black bloc in the long term, which maintains CO, NV, and NM while opening up AZ and even TX.
2) Cantor could mount a write-in campaign and split the conservative vote letting the Democrat win-and he hasn’t ruled it out yet and VA law seems to allow it. He can’t pull a Lieberman though and run on an independent/new party line, which makes it less likely, but a split could mean we take the seat.
3) Brat has very little money, and the left could pour lots of money into his colleague’s campaign for the House (they are both Randolph-Macon profs which is kinda cool!) and make this competitive as the expected Childress v. McDaniels race would be in MS. Of course, the right would also pour money into it making this a real race that wastes money on both sides netting a wash in the end.
4) This is definitely bad news for Mitch McConnell. Grimes has been successfully pivoting away from Obama and the GOP leadership-both of whom are terribly unpopular in KY. You bet Mitch wet his pants at least a little tonight.
5) The harder right the GOP moves, the more likely we keep the White House, the Senate, and take back the House.
But all of the above five things are assumptions. I think it would’ve been better news had this been an unexpected Democratic victory, like when Foster beat Oberweis to succeed Hastert portending the 2006 wave, or the equivalent to Brown beating Coakley in 2010. Neither victor was able to hold onto their seats for long, but it showed that the swing was against the party in power. This is far too harder to read.
I do think Cochran will lose as well, but I also think that means we lose collectively as a country by moving further and further to the right, as we did when Bennett and Lugar lost. Most liberals probably wouldn’t trade Richard Lugar’s decades of foreign policy leadership over the lukewarm sure to be one-term conservative Democrat we ended up getting in Donnelly, but I might, and I’d rather the occasional universal healthcare embracing Bennett over Mike Lee.
No argument that Cantor was an asshole, and to the extent that this Brat fella is more like a libertarian than a true Tea Partier, it might end up making him more progressive/populist since he is relatively anti-bailout, anti-Wall Street and pro-restoring civil liberties. Not sure where he is on drugs, but I’d take a Rand Paul over a neocon close to Wall Street most days of the week-particularly in districts where it’s unlikely we will get a Democrat anyway. It’s definitely a lot more interesting than if Cantor won, but the race will likely be an exception rather than the rule.
That said, bet Jack Trammel is happy tonight and I am sure he will see a big uptick in donations.
I concur with JC, Dave Brat is no inellectual slouch. Graduated from Princeton and then earned a Phd in Economics from American Univ. Practicing Catholic, opposes NSA surveillance of cell phones, repeal and replace Obamacare and my favorite….term limits!
Brat calls the $17 trillion debt “inter generational theft” which appeals to the youth, at least the youth who can afford their own contraception.
No more complaints about Citizen’s United influencing elections, money doesn’t vote, people do.
He graduated from the Princeton Theological Seminary, which is in Princeton, NJ, but is not Princeton University.
He took a sabbatical to work on this: “Ethics as Leading Economic Indicator What went Wrong? Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition and Human Reason.”
The first thing under the “What we believe” part of his website is “That the free enterprise system is the most productive supplier of human needs and economic justice” and ends with “That faith in God, as recognized by our Founding Fathers is essential to the moral fiber of the Nation.”
So, yeah, he has a PhD, but . . . .
as the effect on the mid-term elections in general. But a race with two first time candidates is always somewhat unpredictable.
Who knows what’s in either of their backgrounds? And a first time candidate can end up being defined by something that comes up during the campaign.
I wanted the nails in the coffin of the tea party to keep the lid closed and this just blew the cover off. If we thought republicans were uncooperative before -forget it now. We might as well furlough all of congress and the house until after the elections, because nothing is getting done now.
Not a downgrade. Small keypad. Big finger.
The only real Tea Party litmus test is “Do you just want to watch the world burn?”
http://thegreenmiles.blogspot.com/2014/06/eric-cantor-and-only-real-tea-party.html#.U5hK9vldWSp
There’s a tension between our wishes as 1. Democratic partisans, and as 2. people who want good (or even OK) laws to get passed. This result is good for 1. but bad for 2., at least in the short term.
If you are anticipating that this makes a Democratic electoral wave in 2016 that much more likely, allowing Democrats the kind of window of opportunity to legislate like they had briefly in 2009-2010 — then sure, this is good news.
If you think that a better MO would be to have a functioning Congress that routinely passes legislation that reflects the consensus views of the American public, this is not good news.
And I heartily agree. A center-right friend lamented on Facebook that this definitely meant immigration reform was dead, but he failed to account for the fact that it already was dead. I doubt Cantor, had he won as expected, would’ve been a drum major for that issue. At this point 1 and 2 are linked. We need to truly defeat them a third time at the press inertial level and retake Congress during the next round of redistributing to force them to moderate. I don’t see what their incentives are otherwise. Their gerrymandered seats prevent them from upsetting the base but also entrench them as a regional and extreme party.
An interesting side note-Brat in one of his ads highlighted how much Wall Street money Cantor received. Economic populism and distancing ourselves from corporate America is a successful strategy across the spectrum. We should be very cautious about affiliating ourselves too closely to Wall Street.
David Brat did a nice job linking Cantor to Wall St. I wonder how the electorate will feel about Mrs Goldman Sachs Hillary Clinton receiving $400K from GS for giving two speeches.
On the other hand, “the press inertial level” with respect to Democrats has been a big problem in this nation for some time. I’m glad to see someone finally taking it on.
And I’m really happy to hear about the “next round of redistributing.” I guess I didn’t make the list for the prior rounds but I could use a little redistribution right about now.
I’m just not optimistic that Congress is likely to be functioning any time soon. I might be too optimistic that an election will improve it.
Cantor steps down as Majority Leader and will not run as a write in candidate, triggering intra-party fight for the leadership.
Like almost everything in politics. Recall that when Thermidore rolls around it’s not just the crazies who get it in the neck
But awesome schadenfreude factor.
But it still beats that lousy Smarch weather