Arch-Conservative and Still Too Liberal

The radical right Republican base came out winners: In a Richmond, Virginia primary election, tea party candidate David Brat scored a landslide victory against congressional majority leader Eric Cantor. In the safely Republican precincts, the unknown tea party supporter, who ran on a platform of no amnesty for illegal immigrants and reducing government debt, can safely assume that he will be elected to Congress in November’s midterms.

His victory comes as a shock to Republican moderates. The 52-year-old Cantor was seen as a rising star. He won his congressional district seven times and got up to 79 percent of the party’s base vote in earlier primaries.

Cantor is among the best connected people in Washington. He was considered to have an excellent chance of becoming the next speaker of the House. Among Republicans, he was considered to also have a good chance of becoming the first Jewish president in U.S. history.

Anti-Abortion but Pro Gun

In Congress, Cantor is a staunch conservative who supports free trade, opposes government economic programs, strong ties to Israel and all aid to the Palestinian Authority.

He has also opposed numerous domestic social assistance programs while at the same time voting in favor of bailouts for major banks that enabled them to get out of the mess caused by the financial crisis of 2008. He opposes affirmative action programs designed to help African-Americans and other minorities. He opposes abortion rights but supports gun ownership rights. His campaigns are therefore predictably well financed by the NRA gun lobby and various radical right-to-life groups.

Still, the radical right Republican base in this former slave plantation area in the heart of Virginia, just a three-hour drive from Washington, D.C., thought he was too liberal. While he was supported by the tea party faction in the 2012 election, he was opposed as a typical Washington insider this time. Larry Nordvig, executive director of the Richmond Tea Party, said that although a menu of issues drove voters, including immigration, “there was already an undercurrent of ‘anybody but Cantor.’” Despite spending over $1 million in his campaign compared to Brat’s $200,000, he was defeated nonetheless. The local tea party branch later stated on its website that “Cantor ignored the grassroots, to his own peril.”

Against Loosening Immigration Policies

The man who brought the Republican establishment leader down was surprised by his own success. Brat, an economics professor, focused his campaign on deficit government spending and overly liberal immigration policies. Cantor is one of the few Republicans who recently looked for ways to improve conditions for millions of paperless immigrants. The biggest success of the supposedly rapidly fading tea party thus far had been to drag out and muddy the waters surrounding the immigration debate. George W. Bush himself failed to get immigration reform through during his two terms. Now the divide between Republican factions has been deepened to the point where moderate Republican voters may opt to sit out the November midterm election. That’s why Democratic leaders view the Republican abrupt right turn as an opportunity.