Most of Washington seems shocked, but not for the reason you might think. Cantor and Speaker John Boehner have been playing a sort of good cop - bad cop routine in Washington, Boehner cutting deals with the President while Cantor rumbles menacingly in the background about a conservative coup. Personally, I never took Cantor's threats seriously -- it looked like Kabuki to me. And it seems that it did to his supporters, too. Washington insiders are worried because it looks like the voters saw through their games, and money plus clever symbolism may not be enough to keep them in power.
This is alarming on the one hand, because it suggests that from now on Republicans will have an even harder time making any concessions to the President. Who will make a budget deal now? On the other hand it is refreshing to see that voters are not impressed by the sort of insider games Cantor has been playing, or by his high profile on the talk shows, or by the millions he spent on tv ads. They want someone who can be trusted to do what he says.
On another front it shows that the program of the Bush-Rove wing of the GOP, to recruit culturally conservative Hispanics into the party by offering a compromise on immigration, will not fly with the small town and suburban whites who are the party backbone. Hillary's team is partying it up right now.
UPDATE
As it happens, Public Policy Polling polled Eric Cantor's district about immigration on primary night, and they did not find much anti-immigrant sentiment:
72% of voters in Cantor’s district support the bipartisan immigration reform legislation on the table in Washington right now to only 23% who are opposed. And this is an issue voters want to see action on. 84% think it’s important for the US to fix its immigration system this year, including 57% who say it’s ‘very’ important. Even among Republicans 58% say it’s ‘very’ important, suggesting that some of the backlash against Cantor could be for a lack of action on the issue.Instead, they found a lot of disappointment with Cantor personally:
Cantor has a only a 30% approval rating in his district, with 63% of voters disapproving. The Republican leadership in the House is even more unpopular, with just 26% of voters approving of it to 67% who disapprove. Among GOP voters Cantor’s approval is a 43/49 spread and the House leadership’s is 41/50.Interesting. My interpretation would be that immigration is just one of several issues on which Republican voters no longer trust Cantor, and it fits with my theory that Cantor's habit of posturing as the hardliner and then supporting Boehner's deals has mostly served to undermine his own reputation.
2 comments:
sumeyoareI'm unimpressed with the immigration explanation. Seems to me if immigration were the driving force behind Cantor's fall in Richmond VA, senator Lindsay Graham would have had a harder time than he had in South Carolina. I believe Graham beat a number of challengers with 56% of the vote, and his name is on the immigration bill. South Carolina is supposed to be the place where conservatives hate illegal immigration (or undocumented aliens depending on what your preference is).
What you have here with Cantor's loss is a bunch of pundits and so-called experts caught with their pants down, and they are scrambling for the first explanation/excuse they can come up with. I suspect it will take a while to figure out why Cantor lost and lost as bad as he did. I have my own non-expert opinion of Cantor: my reaction to him is entirely visceral. He strikes me as a phony with a painted-on smile, the kind of smile that a crazy person wears while repeatedly stabbing and twisting the knife in you. How's that for an opinion on why he lost?
I'm skeptical that you could build a winning coalition out sheer moral rejection of Cantor's strategies with Boehner. Brat may well have run a fairly skilful campaign, in which he avoided saying anything too stupid and controversial (which, so far, has proven a real hurdle for tea party types). Plus, the fact that the establishment didn't take him seriously meant they didn't poke much at his wingnut backing ("Mr. Brat, do you agree with Ms. Ingraham when she says Islam is a devil religion?" or whatever). It'll be interesting to see what serious media scrutiny does to his campaign in the general election.
I'm also struck that the margin of disapproval of Cantor among GOPers seems smaller than his margin of failure in the vote. I don't know what this means, but it seems potentially significant.
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