[RICHMOND, VIRGINIA]
During their June 30 meeting to elect new board positions, the members of the Henrico County Republican Committee fill less than a third of the cavernous Deep Run High School auditorium. It’s late on a Monday evening, and as the chairman drawls off the list of member names for a roll call vote, it becomes clear that several people failed to make the trip into this corner of the suburban labyrinth north of Richmond. However, one absence is much more prominent than the rest. Representative Eric Cantor is not present.
Cantor’s astonishing primary defeat on June 10 hangs over the entire meeting, along with a broader concern about the cohesiveness of the local GOP. Fred Gruber, the chairman of the entire 7th District’s Republican Party, talks about the need to unify the party. Gruber defeated the incumbent chairman—a Cantor favorite—in May, at a convention in which Tea Party activists booed the majority leader during his speech. The two candidates for vice-chair of programs echo the unification message. Even Dave Brat, the economics professor who beat Cantor in the primary, says, “I’m working to unify every facet of the Republican Party: independents, libertarians, grass-roots, Tea Party folks … anyone who believes in those principles that I believe are American principles.”
But these calls for unity reveal an underlying anxiety brought about by Cantor’s defeat. Throughout the GOP, there seems to be a sense of disquiet about the future of the country, fueled by disillusionment and anger at the perceived failures of the federal government. In Virginia and elsewhere, the Republican Party is divided over how to alleviate this apprehension. The 7th District primary embodies the crux of the rift, with the pragmatic Cantor, on the one hand, and the fiercely principled Brat, on the other.
The Elephant in the Room
For many years, Cantor’s seat had been safe. Apart from his first House race in 2000, in which he beat a primary opponent by only 264 votes, he has faced weak local opposition. In 2010, for instance, he beat his Democratic opponent by more than 25 percent. In 2012, even in a strong year for Democrats nationally and in statewide Virginia races, he won by 17 points—aided in part by GOP-friendly redistricting that was approved by the Department of Justice in 2012. As House majority leader, he wielded huge political influence, and many expected him to become the next speaker of the House after the anticipated retirement of John Boehner (R-Ohio).
However, the experience in House leadership, particularly following the rise of the Tea Party, changed Cantor. As David Wasserman, House editor at the Cook Political Report, notes in an interview with the HPR, “Cantor used to be known as the conservative rival to John Boehner. And in the past two years, increasingly Cantor has had to take on the burden of putting down the [Republican Party’s] Tea Party rebellion.” Despite his statements against the Obama administration’s position in the government shutdown talks and on a host of other issues, he found himself, as Wasserman puts it, “trying to convince colleagues not to shut down the government, trying to convince colleagues to raise the debt ceiling, even flirting with immigration reform. And that really came back to haunt him.”
Moreover, the challenges of House leadership pitted Cantor against the Tea Party wing in his own district. “I just don’t think people in the Seventh District appreciated that sometimes he was not representing [them] only, but the Republican Caucus. And they just didn’t like that,” says Nancy Russell, the chairwoman of the Hanover County GOP, in an interview with the HPR. (Hanover reported among the highest returns for Brat—in most of the county’s precincts, his votes more than doubled Cantor’s.) The majority leader’s tepid support for immigration reform, an issue on which Brat attacked him, became representative of what was seen as his larger divergence from conservative principles during his time in office. Apart from losing touch with conservative ideology, Cantor was thought to have lost touch with his district—which, in the primary, meant the same thing.
Of course, other members of the Republican leadership had to face primary challengers this year, including Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Appropriations. Cantor was the only one who lost. Cantor’s wildly inaccurate internal poll predicted at 34-point victory; on June 10, he lost to Brat by 10 percent. His vast expenditures on campaign mailers and yard signs ($133,000—more than half of Brat’s fundraising total leading up to June) failed to compensate for the crowds Brat was drawing at Republican meetings across the district. For example, Brat packed the room at a Hanover Republican Committee meeting that Russell was chairing. “There were so many people there that I got in trouble with the Bass Pro Shops, where we have our meetings. We exceeded our capacity!” she laughs.
Most importantly, Wasserman adds, “Cantor took the wrong tactical fork in the road …[because he] was perhaps too aggressive.” His campaign ran ads that falsely labeled Brat a liberal college professor, raising his cash-strapped opponent’s profile and drawing further media, Tea Party, and voter attention toward Brat. From one perspective, then, the primary result is a cautionary tale about campaign strategy. If Cantor had ignored Brat, and if he had spent more time making appearances in his district rather than on Capitol Hill, his primary challenge might simply have fizzled out.
Mourning in America
David Brat is engaging and energetic, if a little bit tired, as he delivers his stump speech to the Henrico Republican Committee. “The currents are not moving in a good direction right now, culturally,” he says to the auditorium. “And our culture is going to be our economy.” His address sounds profoundly pessimistic: the nation is on the brink of crises from all sides—economically, socially, militarily, and ethically—and in the absence of conservative principles, Americans are going to fall off the edge.
If the immediate blame for Cantor’s defeat lay in campaign missteps and a strategy that simultaneously underestimated and overcompensated for the Tea Party threat, then the underlying source may be the deep anxiety and discontent felt throughout the Republican Party. Much of this disquiet is centered on the United States’ economic woes, such as the federal budget, the national debt, and the costs of entitlement programs.
These worries are creating a divide within the party that endangers incumbents while opening the way to political newcomers like Brat. As Jimmie Massie, a Republican member of the state House of Delegates who represents part of Henrico, explains in an interview with the HPR, “Within the Republican Party, you have those people who are just absolutely incensed [with Washington, D.C.], and they’re just of the mentality: ‘Let’s start fresh. Let’s throw them all out.’ But the other part of the party says, ‘Hey, Eric Cantor is not the problem. It’s the secular, social welfare state Democrats that are the problem. So instead of throwing out good Republicans, let’s focus our time and our energy on defeating liberal Democrats.’”
Pervasive anti-Washington sentiment has existed for years: since 2011, national congressional approval ratings have consistently fallen below 20 percent. But this election cycle’s spat of GOP primary challengers also appear to demonstrate a widespread and robust movement against congressional leadership. In these cases, it’s not just freshman lawmakers or representatives forced into an early battle by redistricting who have to fight for their lives: instead, it’s Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, and Thad Cochran who have to spend seemingly unprecedented energy just to retain their party’s nomination.
In many ways, it was this sort of discontent that projected Eric Cantor onto the national stage. Together with then-Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)—the so-called “Young Guns” who had helped the Republican Party take back the House in 2010—he capitalized on the wave of Tea Party-backed discontent and worked to corral new members behind an agenda that prioritized fiscal conservatism. However, in the light of the new standards that he himself had set forth, Cantor appeared unsatisfactory. For one, he had overseen a series of failed political maneuvers on Capitol Hill surrounding Obamacare, the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling, and the government shutdown. On the policy side, he seemed insufficiently dedicated to the free market, advocating for institutions like the Export-Import Bank—which uses Treasury funding to provide loans to foreign purchasers of American products. Thus, even though he helped craft the narrative that America had gone fiscally awry, he was eventually viewed as part of the problem: he became the boogeyman in his own ghost story.
Cantor’s defeat could also have more concrete consequences for the region. Massie notes that, because Virginia relies heavily on federal funding, the loss of the House majority leader will compound the retirements of Representatives Jim Moran (a Democrat) and Frank Wolf (a Republican), both of whom serve on the House Appropriations Committee. “Virginia is going to be having a very difficult time,” Massie observes. In addition, Cantor had been a successful fundraiser for the Republican Party, and he had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to local and statewide campaigns and Republican committees. Now, state Republicans may have to search for new avenues for fundraising, at a time when the party is both internally divided and losing—since 2012, all statewide races have been won by Democrats.
A Red Herring?
Nearly a month after the primary results came in, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published an editorial by Bill Bolling, a former lieutenant governor and Republican, who cited an unusually high incidence of independents and Democrats voting against Cantor on June 10 (Virginia has an open primary system). The solution to similar upsets, he argued, was to close the primary to non-party members. This proposal seems to skirt the larger issues at play in the race.
Assuming that the exit polls were accurate—they were conducted by the same firm that predicted Cantor to win by 34 points—the fact remains that many of the independents were likely conservative, first-time primary voters who would have voted Republican in the general election. The real problem at the heart of Cantor’s defeat was a combination of tactical errors and conservative discontent. And it’s the latter that spells trouble for incumbent candidates who feel forced to comply with demands of ideological purity. Bolling should have learned this lesson: after all, in the most recent gubernatorial race, he dropped out after lagging behind a conservative firebrand in the polls.
Image credit: Flickr / Gage Skidmore