Republicans: The (Dreadful) June Surprise

International comparisons are sometimes dangerous, but on Tuesday evening, at the announcement of the results of the Republican primaries in Virginia, the mood of the Republican decision-makers was probably similar to that of the UMP (French center-right party) after the dark blue wave of the European elections. The comparisons end there. The rise of the extreme right in France was predictable. On the other hand, the political execution of Eric Cantor — No. 2 in the Republican majority in the House of Representatives — by an almost unknown tea party candidate during primaries believed to have been won in advance, seems to have provoked real panic in the Washington establishment. This disaster augurs a major political crisis at the approach of the midterm congressional election in November 2014.

And yet, during some seven terms in Congress, Eric Cantor has never hidden his deeply conservative nature, to the point of obtaining a perfect score from the anti-abortion association “Right to Life.” However, his functions in the Republican upper echelons have obliged him, of course, to make the occasional compromise with the House’s Democratic minority. Like Speaker of the House John Boehner, the No. 2 ended up — against the advice of the most furious members of his party — promoting the vote to raise the debt ceiling and the return to work of 800,000 federal civil servants following the federal government’s shutdown. More recently, his electoral woes can be explained by his support of a Republican version of the immigration reform proposed by Barack Obama. The idea of providing a legal route toward American citizenship for some of the 12 million undocumented immigrants, many of whom have been settled in the United States for decades, seemed intolerable to the tea party fringe.

Dave Brat, a literally unknown economics teacher at a college in Virginia, based his poverty-stricken campaign on Cantor’s supposed spinelessness with regard to immigration. The tea party itself, without disowning the candidate, believed so little in his chances that it didn’t deem it wise to organize his electoral funding. Brat was therefore elected with a budget of under $200,000 — the same amount as the restaurant bills of his haughty opponent. The key to this victory, which is shaking the Republican Party, is undoubtedly because of this, rather than ideological arguments: “Dollars don’t vote,” Brat retorted to his supporters on Tuesday evening. “[Voters] do!”

The rejection of the electoral system, of the $7 billion in private funding squandered in the 2012 presidential and congressional campaigns, and the fury at a political class that is out of touch with its electorate certainly contributed to the staggering victory of Dave Brat, who has been in hiding for a few days in order to digest the shock of his election. For all that, is the tea party a rising electoral force or simply the expression of voters appalled at the Washington microcosm? The Republican establishment, tempted to move too far to the right in the hope of satisfying its militant “base” close to the tea party, might draw the wrong conclusions from the upheaval in Virginia, and throw the centrist electorate into a panic in the fall of 2014.