The Dems don't have a candidate. Brat will be opposed by a Green and a Libertarian in the general.
Consequently, there was no benefit to them turning out to vote for Brat.
“The Dems don’t have a candidate.”
The Dems HAVE a candidate, a demonrat one!
They didn’t need to list his name on the primary ballot because the Dem party gave him their nomination in advance of the primary!
“Because the district is so reliably Republican and Cantor being so powerful, the democrats did not even field a candidate: until Monday this week. His name is Jack Trammel, a professor from the same obscure liberal arts college a few miles off interstate 95.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/11/1306086/-The-Coup-D-Etat-in-Virginia-s-7th-District#
He is their Dem candidate, the party gave him their nomination.
EDITED--Eric Cantor's Pollster Tries to Explain Why His Survey Showed Cantor Up 34 Points.
Ntl Journal By Shane Goldmacher, June 11, 2014
Less than a week before voters dumped the House majority leader, an internal poll for Cantor's campaign, trumpeted to the Washington Post, showed Cantor cruising to a 34-point victory in his primary. Instead, Cantor got crushed, losing by 10 percentage points. How did Cantor's pollster, veteran Republican survey-taker John McLaughlin, get the historic race so terribly wrong?
In an email to National Journal, McLaughlin, whose firm has been paid nearly $75,000 by Cantor's campaign since 2013, offered several explanations: unexpectedly high turnout, last-minute Democratic meddling, and stinging late attacks on amnesty and immigration. "Primary turnout was 45,000 2 years ago," McLaughlin wrote. "This time 65,000. This was an almost 50% increase in turnout."
Translation: McLaughlin's estimate of who was a "likely Republican" voter was way, way off the mark. But Cantor's total number of votes still shrunk, even as the total number of primary voters went up dramatically in 2014. He secured 37,369 primary votes in 2012 and less than 29,000 this year, with 100 percent of precincts reporting.
Meanwhile, McLaughin wrote that "attacks on immigration and amnesty charges from the right in last week hurt." Then McLaughlin cited the "Cooter" factor – the fact that former Rep. Ben Jones, a Georgia Democrat who played Cooter in The Dukes of Hazzard, had written an open letter urging Democrats to vote for Brat to help beat Cantor.
"Over the weekend Democrats like Ben Jones and liberal media were driving their Democratic voters on the internet into the open primary," McLaughlin wrote. "Eric got hit from right and left. In our polls two weeks out Eric was stronger with Republicans at 70% of the vote, but running under 50% among non Republicans.""Untold story," McLaughlin continued, "is who were the new primary voters? They were probably not Republicans."
SOURCE http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/eric-cantor-s-pollster-tries-to-explain-why-his-survey-showed-cantor-up-34-points-20140611