The Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary in Virginia’s 7th District tonight to Tea Party Challenger Dave Brat.
The conservative challenger’s victory halts one of the most meteoric rises in national politics, and illustrates the strong anti-incumbent fever that has taken over Cantor’s Richmond-area district. Cantor is the second House incumbent to lose this primary season – Texas GOP incumbent Ralph Hall was defeated by a tea-party backed challenger at the end of May.
And the idiot Democrats didn’t field a challenger because they thought the seat was not winnable. Stupid.
Correction: According to David Nir at Daily Los, there is a Democratic challenger Democrat, Jack Trammel, who, like Brat, is a professor at Randolph-Macon College.
This also throws Republican leadership into question.
Up Date:
HuffPo has piece that there was a crazy plan by former congressman Ben Jones (D-Ga.), better known as “Cooter” from Dukes of Hazzard, who ran against Cantor in 200:
Crossing party lines to vote in an open primary has a long tradition in the solidly one-party South, Cooter argues in his letter. “[B]y voting for David Brat in the Seventh District Republican primary, we Democrats, independents, and Libertarians can make a big difference in American politics,” he argues. “It is your right to cast that vote. It is an ‘open’ primary and it doesn’t preclude anyone from voting anyway they wish in November. It may be the only way to empower those who want to make a statement about the dysfunctional Congress and ‘politics as usual.'”
Who knew this may have been the reason for Cantor’s loss.
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I’m so happy to see him defeated, though I wish it weren’t a wave of anti-immigration sentiment that brought him down.
Wow….did anybody see this coming????
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Cantor was his rival for Speaker