It means the House of Representatives probably becomes even a little more conservative,
It’s not clear from your anodyne statement what this actually means. I think the house of representatives, at least on the republican side of the aisle, will become more reactionary, less pragmatic, and more paranoid. Consider Eric Cantor’s strategy during the debt ceiling fiasco.
Director, BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism Program
That’s worthy of some BoingBoing commentary, in itself…
The entrepreneur who brought Ayn Rand to scores of campuses explains how and why.
That’s why I’ll hang on to my M24/47 and CZ82.
Upon election, he apparently said, “God acted through people on my behalf. It’s an unbelievable miracle!” He wasn’t well-funded. It does look like people were just really, really angry at Cantor. That may not be enough to keep Brat in office in for long.
Here are the titles of some of his books:
“Ethics as Leading Economic Indicator? What went Wrong? Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition and Human Reason.” (listed in CV)
“God and Advanced Mammon – Can Theological Types Handle Usury and Capitalism?” (published)
“An Analysis of the Moral Foundations in Ayn Rand.” (published)
In other words, he never really left the seminary.
He may have made in past Cantor, but even in Virginia, he’s going to have to learn to rein in on the sermons. Hey you kingslayers - you may not want to hand your state over to the Church. After all, in Britain, that’s who actually gave the king his crown.
I’ve been using pretty much the same argument for the UKIP party in Britain.
Perhaps the best way is to break up the duopoly.
All governments should be a coalition.
Virginia is the place where the Baptist faith was created. It’s heavily, heavily Protestant, and his district especially so. I’m not so worried about professions of faith - I’m more interested in integrity and common human decency.
The dude’s actively against the NSA violating the 4th Amendment, so there’s that. We’ll see him flesh out his platform in the coming weeks, since I don’t think even he was expecting to win - he looked a little shell-shocked in his victory speech XD
My version of your representative is Rep. Steve Southerland. He rails against those government insiders and all the wasted money…except when he can brag about the government spending in his district. Then he assumes full credit.
Personally I find any third party victory a good thing. I don’t know what this particular candidates stances are, but I know a lot of “Tea Party” people are more libertarian in their views, which are often more inline with US moderates. (liberal social views, conservative governing views).
“common human decency.”
He ran on a platform that consisted, essentially, of “Eric Cantor doesn’t want to make life hard enough for immigrant kids.” I am not exactly holding my breath for that common human decency.
I don’t think that’s really accurate. The tea party is, for example, largely anti-gay-marriage and anti-choice. They’re also largely climate-change deniers and are, I think, generally perceived as anti-science.
This is the scariest part, IMO.
Dude won by just over 7,000 votes in an election in which all of the voters would have fit in an average-sized NFL stadium with room to spare–and, moreover, those voters represented about 10% of the electorate in that district. I think we’re going to need more data before we declare this a national resurgence.
Another Ken Cuchenelli
It is true Cantor ran a crappy campaign, a mix of feeling entitled to win, terrible internal polling and terrible choices for spending, but the opponent was in no way well funded.
Cantor raised and spent a little over $5,000,000.
Opponent raised and spent $122,000
Source: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/eric-cantor-david-brat-steak-houses
This has been happening for the past several elections. The house gets a little more dysfunctional with each cycle, and it’s already having deleterious effects on the basic functioning of the federal government.
This is intentional. The whole point of these ultraconservatives is to prevent government influence in their lives, and throwing monkeywrenches into the system constantly is one way to do that.
As for the district here. It’s gerrymandered enough that the conservative is going to win unless he starts going on and on about legitimate rape or something. The number of independent voters is just low enough that they can’t realistically flip the district without support from loyal Republican voters. That’s how gerrymandering works. Virginia wouldn’t be a red state without it.
Very true. The first articles I saw about this actually had the numbers backwards. Thanks, sorry for the error!
I can’t get over the 5 million number for Cantor personally. To me it sounds like he raised the money and then spent it on republican “consultants” as sort of a spread the wealth/kickback process that had literally nothing to do with actually helping his campaign.
I love all these conservative hucksters, anything they can do to drain the war chests of both RWN candidates and funders without actually helping them win is ok by me. I think this campaign is the best example of that I have ever seen.
IMHO this victory was just the Tea Party showing that it can consistently and reliably get out the vote for a candidate (you may call them crazy, but they call themselves passionate) and Cantor just neglecting the primary to his own peril. When you’re only talking about a few thousand votes you don’t need a huge organization to sway the result. Plus, in Virginia only people registered to the party can vote in primaries, so there is no moderating voice from the other side pushing the vote back towards the center.
There is definitely a danger that Cantor’s supporters won’t get behind this new guy and won’t show up to vote in November, possibly handing the otherwise safe district over to the Democrats for a term, but that’s a long shot.
[quote=“TacoChucks, post:37, topic:34160”]
I can’t get over the 5 million number for Cantor personally. To me it sounds like he raised the money and then spent it on republican “consultants” as sort of a spread the wealth/kickback process that had literally nothing to do with actually helping his campaign.[/quote]
He would be in good company in Virginia politics if so. Maybe he can join Bob McDonald in probably getting off scott free.
Actually, Virginia is an open primary. It’s just that Cantor is that disliked…
