SHOCK poll: Eric Cantor (R) in primary trouble !?

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Guess I'll be voting in the primary then.

Please do, we don't need to elect anymore brats to office

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Good, he was a douche.
And the dems have Jack Trammell.

I take it that you like Trammell.

Judge Smith and Willis Robertson lost in '66 when the Organization imploded. Apparently last time a House Majority Leader lost was ... 1899.

History got made in a surprisingly quick fashion tonight.

I didn't think that party leaders got knocked out anymore in the way Cantor was.

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Don't feel bad for Cantor. He may never be the first Jewish speaker of the House, but he's going to become insanely rich earlier in his career than anticipated.

Isn't he already insanely rich?

Anyway, have we heard who will replace him as majority leader?

Possibly Cathy McMorris Rodgers, for all we know, but that is just an educated guess. She seems like a reasonable candidate for the position, and is probablythe only representative in Republican House leadership right now who is capable of taking over the Majority Leader spot other than Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy.

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You really to have to throw in guys like Justin Amash and Jason Chaffetz as empowered to move into leadership right now.

I can live with Chaffetz being Majority Leader, but Amash appears to be a loose cannon. Hopefully enough of the Republican House caucus would recognize this. McMorris-Rodgers might have enough clout with Tea Party congressmen to hold off any representatives who only align with the movement from gaining traction.

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FWIW, DKE says Northam won CD7 with 50.6%. Unlikely Brat ends up as bad a candidate as Jackson, but just saying.

That's an interesting fact.

Unless Brat shows us otherwise, I would expect that he will perform at least as well as Cuccinelli did in CD7 (he won 52% of the vote in that district)

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It would be smart for the the Dems nationwide, at this point, to embrace the likes of Cochran and Cantor. Whether Cantor was or was not a moderate is irrelevant: he has to be a moderate now, at least in the Dems telling of it. The narrative should be: Republicans are killing off their moderates, those who are trying to make things work. Whether the local candidate is moderate or not, he will be in the caucus with the Brats and McDaniels. It will not hurt the actual Brats and McDaniels, of course, but it can build a narrative useful in more moderate places.

One possible comeback to this is that while Cantor and Cochran could be described as having moderate tones for the purposes of this discussion, they were not paying enough attention to their constituents, and would have won their primaries if they had remained in better touch with their voters.

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It would be smart for the the Dems nationwide, at this point, to embrace the likes of Cochran and Cantor. Whether Cantor was or was not a moderate is irrelevant: he has to be a moderate now, at least in the Dems telling of it. The narrative should be: Republicans are killing off their moderates, those who are trying to make things work. Whether the local candidate is moderate or not, he will be in the caucus with the Brats and McDaniels. It will not hurt the actual Brats and McDaniels, of course, but it can build a narrative useful in more moderate places.

One possible comeback to this is that while Cantor and Cochran could be described as having moderate tones for the purposes of this discussion, they were not paying enough attention to their constituents, and would have won their primaries if they had remained in better touch with their voters.

Their Republican voters, maybe, but not the population at large.  Primary wins can hardly be called representative of how the public feels.  I've also never heard that being used as a comeback before.  Accusing your opponents of being outside the mainstream seems to be more effective.

Well, I guess you have a point.

I can see Democrats discussing McDaniel a great deal since he doesn't seem to be in the mainstream by any stretch, but Brat doesn't seem like he will really impact many voters.

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Map of VA-07.

Red = Cantor, Purple = Brat.

Cantor did better in Spotsylvania County than I would have expected considering his overall loss. I suppose the result could be attributed to the county being an exurb of Washington, D.C.

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I'm not sure why so many liberals and Democrats on the Forum are happy over this result. Yes, Cantor was a thorn in the side of any attempts at bipartisanship, even by Boehner, but whoever takes his role can be assured from this election result to be worse.

Any chance of even partial immigration reform has been pushed back at least several years.

On every other issue under the sun, any member of the GOP caucus even dreaming about a bipartisan move towards the sensible center will, more than ever, now fear of being "Cantored" by the far right. (And in a couple weeks, I fear, the Senate GOP caucus will live in terror of being "Cochraned").

Dems can't even be happy over a potential race for this district. Brat may be pretty extreme, but it's a +10 R district. The GOP is going to keep this hands down. At worst we MIGHT have to put a BIT of $ in to ensure a win, and probably only if Brat pulls some Akin-like comments.

Democrats don't want immigration reform (unless it's immediate full citizenship for every illegal immigrant)
Republicans want immigration reform.
Democrats can be happy because now Republicans are unlikely to force them to vote against reform again and they can keep the issue benefiting them.

^ That sounds about right. I suppose one could say that both parties seem to want immigration reform entirely on their own terms.

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I see this as a case of the tortoise and the hare.  The tortoise, Mitch McConnell, went back to his state, campaigned, brought home the pork-barrel, and did everything he could to reingratiate himself to Kentucky, a state where he was nonetheless widely despised, and pulled it off, winning his primary.  Eric Cantor, the hare, eager to get to the top of the House GOP food chain and becoming the Washington insider par excellence, ignored his district and his mosquito of a primary opponent and lost.

Take a page from Mitch McConnell: sometimes it pays to be the tortoise.

That's a good analogy. McConnell looks the part of a tortoise to boot.

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Map of VA-07.

Red = Cantor, Purple = Brat.

Cantor did better in Spotsylvania County than I would have expected considering his overall loss. I suppose the result could be attributed to the county being an exurb of Washington, D.C.

Yet Cantor's worst areas were the exurbs of Richmond. So not likely.

All exurbs aren't created equally. Spotsylvania might be more moderate than the surrounding counties of Richmond, which could have helped Cantor there. I'm sure that Spotsylvania has more government workers than other counties in CD-7, being attached to the nation's capital, and the Republican variety of those workers probably preferred Cantor.

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The conservative National Review's John Hund argues that Eric Cantor's ousting could prevent a revision of the Voting Rights Act favored by liberals.