Free Republic

That's how many people it took to bring down House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, doom immigration reform and leave all but the most tea-sodden Republicans quaking. No, it wasn't the Democrats who did it. Various complicated analyses of voting patterns confirm what anyone who has ever tried to convince even their own mother to vote "strategically" knows: Voters don't work that way. They may cast their vote to send a message — that happens all the time — but not to execute a strategy that depends on their voting for someone they don't like at all so that someone else...

Last night I posted what I thought was a very balanced comment on the 7th district congressional election. I expressed my personal disappointment that Eric Cantor lost, congratulated David Brat on his victory, and expressed concern over the deep divisions that currently exist in our party. I encourage you to read the comments that were made in response. The negativity and vitriol of these comments (dare I say the hate in some of them) reflects what is wrong in our party right now. We have to learn to disagree without being disagreeable, and we have to learn to respect the...

Top Jeb Bush adviser Mike Murphy, who did not even pay attention to Dave Brat's campaign like Breitbart News did, has falsely been claiming that Cantor's embrace of amnesty for illegal immigrants was not the reason he lost last Tuesday. Liberal writer Mickey Kaus had enough of Murphy's nonsense and slammed him on Twitter on Friday evening. Kaus became Brat's de facto press secretary and top advocate on Twitter in the last months of the campaign because Kaus, like Brat, opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants because it would hurt American workers. He mentioned to Murphy that talk radio host Laura...

Eric Cantor, next Republican National Committee chairman? Former RNC chair Michael Steele thinks it's a possibility after the House majority leader was defeated Tuesday in a Virginia Republican primary. "With the upcoming presidential election, there's a lot of interest in Eric Cantor serving as national chairman of the RNC," Steele said Saturday on MSNBC's "Up With Steve Kornacki.""In fact I think he'd be interesting because he started dialogues on poverty and some other issues that were sort of outside of what Republicans have traditionally talked about. So he could bring a very interesting voice into that space," he said. (VIDEO-AT-LINK)

The official topic of the conference, emblazoned on materials handed out to guests gathered here at a luxury Norwegian-inspired resort, was “The Future of American Leadership.” But the unofficial theme was made clear not long into breakfast on Friday, when a guest asked Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky the question on everyone’s mind: Is Hillary beatable?(SNIP) “This is the place where, I believe, the future of the party is really going to come out of,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a New York hedge fund manager and former Romney fund-raising bundler. “This is the Republican Party’s Bell Labs. This is our R...

Most of us are still trying to figure out exactly what was behind Eric Cantor’s shocking primary loss on Tuesday. But some on the left were able to jump to conclusions almost immediately after the election. Their hypothesis? Eric Cantor is a victim of Tea Party anti-Semitism. Even ignoring the fact that Dave Brat was not technically a Tea Party candidate, the theory has zero supporting evidence. It is ridiculous to suggest that a district that has been electing Cantor since 2000 recently developed a case of raging anti-Semitism. This is a case of liberals assuming that everyone is as...

The Democratic presidential prospect could have demographics on her side.The best news for Hillary Rodham Clinton this week wasn't the mostly positive reviews for her memoir Hard Choices. It was the hard fall taken by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor when he was ousted by a tea-party challenger who denounced him as insufficiently conservative, particularly on immigration. The Virginia Republican's defeat virtually extinguishes the already flickering chances that House Republicans will pass immigration reform before the 2014 election, and even dims the odds that the chamber will take action before 2016. And that significantly improves prospects in the next presidential...

Many liberals privately mourn the departure of Eric Cantor from the ranks of the House GOP leadership. At a symposium on “Voting in America,” several of the attendees told me that they and Majority Leader Cantor were within striking distance of a compromise to restore many of the provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that were struck down by the Supreme Court last year as unconstitutional. The Court ruled that certain provisions that singled out certain states and jurisdictions for special oversight based on 50-year-old data were obsolete and could no longer be justified. Liberal civil-rights groups were furious...

DES MOINES — It’s not often that a Democratic Party top national strategist travels to Iowa to lament an election loss of a prominent conservative Republican leader. But that happened Friday when Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz warned that the defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican who is the second most-powerful U.S. House leader, could be a harbinger of deeper political extremism, gridlock and obstructionism....

The Spin: Eric Cantor's Loss (Vanity) The Democrats and the Media (really, are they different?) have been climbing all over themselves to convince us that Amnesty was NOT the reason that Eric Cantor lost to Dave Brat on Tuesday (there are even a few trolls on this site saying the same). They even have a poll showing 72% of the people in the district actually support of Amnesty. They are desperate to get Amnesty through this term, and for good reason - it will be a long time before they ever get another chance for such a country-killing (or transforming,...

Second-term Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, plans to challenge Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., for the second most powerful House leadership position. Labrador just released a statement announcing his bid for House majority leader, saying he believes Majority Leader Eric Cantor's primary loss on Tuesday shows, “Americans are looking for a change in the status quo.” The leadership election is scheduled for June 19. Labrador made the announcement a half-day after it appeared McCarthy had the job locked up with no opponents. Sign Up for the Politics Today newsletter! Now, a Labrador aide said, the contest is up in the air. “The...

ERIC CANTOR wasn’t the only person at a loss for words on Tuesday night. His pollster, McLaughlin & Associates, found itself trying to explain the impossible — how a projected 34 percent lead for the House majority leader 12 days before the election could end up an 11-point loss on Election Day to David Brat of the Tea Party in the Virginia Republican primary. We’ve all been there. There isn’t a pollster alive — me included — who hasn’t had to take the walk of shame, hat in hand, to explain to an angry client why a predicted outcome simply...

Gets "B" for 2011-2014. Gets "A-minus" for Congressional career.

INTERVIEWER: What happened in Virginia the other day, does that concern you for your chances here in this run-off? COCHRAN: I don't know what you're talking about. What happened in Virginia? INTERVIEWER: With Eric Cantor losing his seat. COCHRAN: Well, I haven't followed that campaign very closely at all. INTERVIEWER: Really? Later, the interviewer says, "Well, Eric Cantor lost his seat as the Majority Leader." To which Cochran replies, "Well, it happens. Some win, some lose."

One day after the GOP’s Lee Terry opened the door to closing off compromises on Capitol Hill, Democrat Brad Ashford tells Nebraska Watchdog that Terry’s talk is “ridiculous, it’s disappointing.” Following Eric Cantor’s tea party ambush on Tuesday, Terry, an 8-term incumbent, told CNN, “Do we compromise? How do we work together? All of this is now in question.” Ashford says the “Cantor lesson” is just the opposite. “You can’t find solutions without working together,” says Ashford. Terry, of course, is coming off his own Cantor-like primary—just last month Terry survived a threat from his right wing, defeating Republican Dan...

In the space of less than a week, 23-year-old Zachary Werrell went from unknown to boy wonder to angry toddler, depending on who was talking. Werrell, who graduated last year from Haverford College, was lauded for having engineered Tuesday's shocking political defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. And, as campaign manager of insurgent David Brat, he was criticized Wednesday for scrubbing his Facebook page, which included provocative comments comparing the shooting of Trayvon Martin with abortion. Multiple efforts to reach Werrell were unsuccessful. His teachers at Haverford, the rigorous, liberal-arts-and-Quaker-values institution on the Main Line, described Werrell as a...

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) has dropped out of the race for House majority leader, leaving current Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as the only candidate in the race. Sessions has released a statement announcing his exit, and his spokeswoman, Torrie Miller, confirmed his departure to the Post. “After thoughtful consideration and discussion with my colleagues, I have made the decision to not continue my run for House majority leader," Sessions said. "Today, it became obvious to me that the measures necessary to run a successful campaign would have created unnecessary and painful division within our party." Sessions had also been...

Asked at his weekly news conference whether the prospects of an overhaul were dead in light of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s primary loss on Tuesday, Boehner responded: “The issue of immigration reform has not changed.”

Conservative Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is headed to Cantor’s (R-Va.) hometown of Richmond for a special town-hall meeting on immigration reform. While the event is actually taking place in the district of Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott, NumbersUSA Virginia noted in an alert to activists that Richmond “neighbors the district of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who will play a major role in the fate of any amnesty bill in the House." King was chastised by Cantor and other Republican leaders last month for controversial comments about young illegal immigrants.

If the GOP is unwilling to stand up to radicals, it might as well just rename itself the Committee to Elect Hillary Clinton. Eric Cantor tried to appease Republican radicals. They turned on him anyway. John Boehner has tried to resist them. They just overwhelmed him. Mitt Romney tried to join them—and in doing so fastened onto his party the platform that lost the presidential election of 2012. At some point, Republican leaders must recognize that they have a fight on their hands whether they like it or not. If they refuse to join that fight, they will be devoured...