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Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, spent his career denouncing liberals, sucking up to the Tea Party, and doing everything possible to derail President Obama’s agenda. Despite this, Cantor was ousted Tuesday by a Republican challenger in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District. Cantor’s loss follows last week’s Mississippi Republican primary, in which Sen. Thad Cochran, another conservative, was edged out by a Tea Party opponent who’s expected to dispatch Cochran in a runoff. How do right-wingers like Cantor and Cochran lose to challengers even further on the right? The answer lies in the extremism of Republican primary voters. On June 2,...

Economics professor Dave Brat crushed House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary Tuesday night, in a campaign that was mostly about Cantor’s supporting amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens. This marks the first time a U.S. House majority leader has ever lost a primary election. His crushing defeat reinforces a central point: Whenever the voters know an election is about immigration, they will always vote against more immigration — especially amnesty.

As conservatives begin to wrap their heads around the shocking primary defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, at least one member of the coup to unseat Speaker John A. Boehner doesn’t think an open spot in leadership will strengthen Boehner’s hand come the 114th Congress. Just minutes after Cantor’s defeat was official on Tuesday night, Rep. Tim Huelskamp told CQ Roll Call that Cantor’s ouster “bodes well for an entire new leadership team.” The Kansas Republican, who hasn’t been quiet about his qualms with leadership, said it’s “too early to tell” exactly how this affects leadership races, “but, again,...

I reported the other day that the Young Guns Network, a group led by two former top aides to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, is spending $100,000 in the primary between Sen. Richard Lugar and state treasurer Richard Mourdock in a bid to protect the Indiana incumbent - and here's what some of that mail looks like. A lit piece that the YG Network dropped focuses, as they'd said it would, on energy policy - but it is targeted to non-Republicans, as it reminds voters that Indiana's GOP primary is an open one in which Democrats and independents can vote.

... what will the new narrative from the MSM be? Before the first GOP primaries this year, we heard from the MSM the long-held narrative: A.) "There is a huge war within the GOP. The GOP needs to do something with these "extremists" (Tea Party)!" Then when Boehner and some others won their primaries, the MSM narrative quickly shifted (as in goal-posts): B.) "The GOP has absorbed the Tea Party!" Now with Eric Cantor losing to David Brat (and that was a huge loss), the MSM won't go back on their narrative, even though they logically would have to admit...

Tuesday’s defeat of the sitting House majority leader, Eric Cantor, apparently sent a series of “messages,” which we in the pundit world who missed all of the signs that The Shock Heard ’Round the Campaign World was coming, are beginning to interpret. Among the strongest messages: Incumbents beware. To hear some tell it, this message is bipartisan. Because Democrats apparently are unfamiliar with the phenomenon of low turnout midterm elections in districts drawn to be more partisan than they were, which would be an interesting observation if it were actually true. The reality is that in most states, the rates...

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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his Republican primary today in a completely befuddling upset that no one saw coming. When people saw that Cantor was behind David Brat, an unknown and underfunded economics professor, in the returns, jaws dropped, and dropped, and dropped until they hit the floor and left everyone so speechless they had no worries of needing to express their shock in more than 140 characters. As was very evident from how Twitter responded.

Hillary Clinton on Wednesday said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R) lost his primary election to a candidate who “basically ran against immigrants” and called for a “more informed” debate on immigration reform. "The negative attitudes about immigration and immigrants, which we are seeing played out in certain places in our country politically are based on a gross misunderstanding," Clinton said during an interview in Chicago with Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

As soon as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) stunningly lost his primary to Dave Brat on Tuesday, the White House proclaimed that Cantor lost his race because he wasn't pro-amnesty enough. Cantor said one of the "great founding principles" of the nation was giving amnesty to the children of illegal immigrants to not penalize them for the mistakes of their parents. Brat said Cantor's comments represented "one of the most radical pro-amnesty statements ever delivered by a sitting representative."

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) plans to step down from his leadership post by the end of July, setting off a weeks-long scramble for the chamber’s number two job, according to three Republicans familiar with his plans. Cantor will formally announce his plans later Wednesday in a meeting with his House Republican colleagues in the basement of the U.S. Capitol.

Concerned that DC Republicans might begin listening to voters rather than Karl Rove, an always sympathetic White House told stunned GOP leaders that “Cantor’s problem wasn’t his position on immigration reform, it was his lack of a position.” That is, Cantor wasn’t too liberal and he had not offended the conservative, Republican base with his promise of passing amnesty or his contemptuous decision to headline an April conference hosted by George Soros and organized labor. In fact if anything, the now defunct Virginia congressman had been TOO conservative! After all, hadn’t Cantor’s campaign sent out direct-mail pieces just before last...

Rep. Eric Cantor will step down as majority leader, according to several Republicans sources, ending a meteoric 13-year Congressional career. Several GOP sources say his resignation from that job will be effective July 31.

In the wake of Rep. Eric Cantor’s stunning primary defeat Tuesday night, many conservatives have rushed to declare the outcome a referendum on Republican efforts to pursue immigration reform, a key wedge issue in the race. But tea party hero Sen. Rand Paul isn’t buying it. In a teleconference with Grover Norquist, a conservative champion of immigration reform, Paul told reporters Wednesday he wouldn’t back off his position on the issue. “I still am for it,” Paul said. “I say everywhere I go that I am for immigration reform.” He argued that Cantor’s loss to a little-known conservative economics professor...

Eric Cantor’s loss is historic. No sitting House majority leader has lost an election since the office was created in 1899. While Cantor’s loss was a stunning surprise, the warning signals were around for a while: 1. Cantor managed to muddle his message on immigration. His direct-mail pieces claimed he was foursquare against amnesty.

Late Tuesday evening, conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham savored David Brat's historic upset victory over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) in Virginia's 7th Congressional District Republican primary. "This was a cataclysmic upending of the old Republican Guard. A strong, substantive, passionate, earnest conservative flattened an arrogant, out of touch, two-faced, moderate Eric Cantor," Ingraham told Breitbart News shortly after the Associated Press declared Brat the victor. Brat, who was not expected to win more than 40 percent of the vote, thumped Cantor by an astounding 55 percent to 44 percent margin. He won going away in a race...

... Behind the scenes, Mr. Cantor worked hard over the last year to wrestle control of the party back from a small band of insurgents and steer it back to the political center on issues from immigration to the economy. Now, his defeat serves as a battle cry for conservatives everywhere who, until now, were in danger of losing their clout inside the party. A case in point: Milton Wolf, the conservative challenging Republican Sen. Pat Roberts in Kansas this year, immediately issued a statement Tuesday night to say, “Eric Cantor isn’t the only incumbent from Virginia who is going...

The No. 1 GOP leader and the No. 3 GOP leader in the House reacted remarkably differently Tuesday night to the stunning defeat of the No. 2 GOP leader, Eric Cantor. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) stuck to his usual routine by hanging out with close friends and aides at an Italian restaurant that he likes -- in part because they let him smoke in a private room. Back at the U.S. Capitol, aides to House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) frantically huddled deep into the night. Were they plotting his next move? No one was talking.

David Brat’s surprise victory Tuesday over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was quickly embraced by the tea party movement – especially national tea party groups that have been looking to score a big win in their battle against GOP incumbents this cycle. Leaders of the Tea Party Patriots quickly chimed in on Twitter. So how much did their groups spend to help Brat win? Zero. Of the measly $4,805 in political expenditures against Cantor reported to the Federal Election Commission, none came from the big national tea party groups, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation. The bulk...

Today’s reflection, and a warning:They said it couldn’t be done – until it was.How’s that amnesty masquerading as immigration reform working out for you now, Eric?When you make a deal with the devil, the devil always wins. “The defeat of the second-ranking Republican in the House by an ill-funded, little-known tea party-backed candidate ranks as the biggest Congressional upset in modern memory and will immediately generate a series of political and policy-related shockwaves in Washington and the Richmond-area 7th district.” The embedded moral, if anyone’s interested, is that flouting the law of the land and thumbing your nose at the will of...