It is not every day that the majority leader in the U.S.
House of Representatives loses—and badly at that—to a primary challenger in an
intra-party contest. In the wake of Jim Cantor’s defeat in June, 2014,
journalists wasted no time in reducing the defeat to one issue: immigration.
Such a reductionist ex-post facto divination of voter intent—as if an
electorate were one monolithic mind writ large—is fraught with difficulties. Beyond
the sheer artifice, such an interpretation offers an easy cover for less
convenient, subterranean political shifts underway and expressed in the vote.
Leaping to the immigration rationale whereby
arch-conservative, or “Tea-Party” Republican voters punished Cantor for having
been willing to work with Democrats on a compromise involving amnesty in some
form, Ali Noorani of an immigration lobbyist group opined that the primary’s
result would make it tougher to get a bill through the U.S. House in the
current session.[1]
Frank Sharry of America’s Voice, “said Cantor’s loss blows up a last-minute
attempt by Republicans to organize support for an immigration bill.”[2]
No doubt both Noorani and Sharry were going off media reports as early as
election night that immigration reform had brought the majority leader down.
To be sure, more elaborate analyses, such as one by The Washington Post, broadened the
explanation to include Cantor’s votes in general and his lack of attention to
his district.[3] Preoccupied
with gaining power over his colleagues by raising money, Cantor missed the
warning signs, and this alone could have annoyed Republican voters back home. Additionally,
as put by Jamie Radtke, co-founder of the Virginia Tea Party, Cantor had “made
an enemy of his friends.”[4]
Put another way, pundits wanting to extrapolate the primary results onto the
national stage may be overlooking the idiosyncratic elements that do not
generalize or go forward.
For all the points needlessly cut off by the reductionism to
immigration or even Cantor’s willingness to compromise with Democrats, the most
important received scarcely any media coverage. Specifically, interviews with
some voters suggest that Cantor lost in part because he had done the bidding of
big business at the expense of the small businesses in Richmond. Stung by
bailouts without strings to the large Wall Street banks that had dangerously
over-leveraged themselves on risky mortgage-backed securities and a dearth of
prosecutions on fraud, Republican voters could not have missed the apparent
collusion between corporate and campaign coffers; Cantor had raised nearly $5.5
million to have a 27-to-1 financial advantage over his challenger.[5]
As astonishing as Dave Brat’s win is, given this financial disparity, the real
lesson from the primary may be that elected officials willing to cut the
financial strings to corporate America may actually do better at home because
the positions and votes would be more closely tailored to the constituents.
Put another way, voters may be hungry for political courage
that shakes the conventional “wisdom.” Teddy Roosevelt must have discovered as
much when he went after the mighty trusts like Standard Oil in the early
twentieth century, and Andrew Jackson nearly a century earlier when he refused
to fund the Second Bank of the United States for fear of encroaching federal
power. This is a message that the powers that be in 2014 doubtless would not
want getting out, and the media dutifully complied with the subterfuge of
immigration reform being in all probability dead for the time being.
[1]
Alan Gomez, “Immigration Bill Looks Doubtful,” USA Today, June 12, 2014.
[2]
Ibid.
[3] David
Fahrenthold, Rosalind Helderman, and Jenna Portnoy, “What
Went Wrong for Eric Cantor?” The
Washington Post, June 12, 2014.
[4]
Ibid.
[5]
Susan Davis And Catalina Camia, “Contests Loom for Top GOP Posts,” USA Today, June 12, 2014.
