Well, it is more of a symptom than a game-change. The mainstream GOP has been swatting at the Tea Party pests over two election cycles now…and the Republicans inability to finish them off says a lot about the support base they’ve cultivated since the Nixon days. The thinly-veiled bigotry, racism, and jingosim of the “Southern Strategy” has enabled the GOP to control much of the US South…without actually admitting to the dark under-structure it was building. The Tea Party just comes out with it…and it resonates in the most regressive districts where the GOP has been conveniently ignoring the sentiments it has played on to stay in office.
Cantor’s fall is an example of that nasty piper finally getting paid. The GOP’s problems are bigger and worse than recognized by the party rank and file. The party has had this coming for some time now.
Progressives and Democrats should find it all quite encouraging…in the short term. Long-term, everyone with an ounce of decency and common sense should watch carefully. Angry whack-jobs, paranoid xenophobes, selfish old fogies, and manipulative racists have managed to build coalitions throughout history. There’s always some kind of venal thought-leader or academic ready to crawl out from the sewer to take advantage of the opportunity.
It’s all interesting news-cyle fodder now…but it could metastasize into something far more dark and sinister if not confronted. Your move, GOP…
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N.B. Riding ~ District when I’m talking since I’m from Canada
This is the thing people don’t get about gerrymandering. If you want to win more seats with fewer votes it means riding the line for your seats and making safe seats for the other guy. Imagine Parties A and B both have 50% support. Then if one riding is 100% B and the other nine ridings are evenly distributed, then it goes 9 seats to A and 1 seat to B, but those A seats are only winning 54-46. If you can gerrymander to make super safe seats for your own party and to win the majority of the seats that means that you had a majority support anyway and the gerrymandering wasn’t doing all that much.
At any rate, even if I don’t like the tea party, I actually do like when things like this happen. Politicians who think it is impossible for them to lose aren’t exactly good for a representative democracy.
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I actually don’t mean to say it is illegal at all, just that there is a right wing campaign consulting/fundraising machine of sorts that runs on candidates spending money they raise from donors large and small. Consultants, strategists, pollsters, advertising development, researchers, etc, all parasitically feed off of republican and right wing politicians. I am sure there are the Dem equivalents as well, but I think it is much more wide spread on the right since they seem to have a lot more money. This $5 million v. $122,000 really highlights it I think.
But, now that you mention it, I would not be surprised if some of it was spent in legally questionable ways to family member "managers, “consultants” or “aides” or just in general on upgrading Cantor’s lifestyle while he “campaigned”.
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I’m hearing a lot of muttering about the idea that Democrats in Virginia showed up to vote against Cantor en masse and skewed the election, knowing that an untested, unknown fringe semi-wingnut would help them a lot more than Cantor would. If so, risky gamble.
I guarantee that you heard that conspiracy theory from someone in the Republican party. That’s the sort of crazy that talking heads just eat up. I guarantee that someone on Fox News will repeat that sometime this week.
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Heh. I would agree if not for this little tidbit:
Director, BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism Program
Dude didn’t look too deeply to work out that logic puzzle.
That one wasn’t a mystery. He’s a Randian. Did you see the papers he put out? This guy thinks Atlas Shrugged has the recipe for a successful society and is morally correct.
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From your link (and thanks):
About twelve years ago we re-examined our charitable giving and realized that our contributions to universities were not typically being used in our shareholders’ best interest. At the same time, we were studying the question of why the United States had moved from the land of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to the “redistributive state.” We became convinced that the reason for this transformation was that the Left had taken over the universities and educated future leaders, including teachers, in statist/collectivist ideas.
Give me your tired, your poor, your hungry masses, yearning to b…oh fuck it, I’ma get mine and fuck alla yalls.
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Well, you’re wrong about where I heard that conspiracy theory – it was from several progressives theorizing sources for the landslide – but I agree that FOX will likely say the same thing. For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with the theory. I just think that a new and fresh voice played better than Cantor, and Cantor underestimated his opponent.
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Well, unless FOX is too busy welcoming their new same old Tea Party overlords. I’m not really sure which side they come down on here.
I think this is short term win for the tea party, long term win for DEMs, mostly just a loss for the GOP.
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Anytime a party leader loses in their own district, the party itself loses a lot of income. Someone like Cantor would be expected (and able) to pull in millions of dollars in donations that would then get spread around to other GOP candidates- Brat, as a newcomer, won’t have the Rolodex or the practiced schmoozing to do this.
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This is going to really really scare a whole bunch of GOP representatives away from immigration reform- most of the negative ads that Brat ran were about Cantor’s willingness to grant “amnesty” to “illegals”, as far as i can see. So the next two sessions of congress will be just as obstructionist as before, and now with additional unwillingness to compromise.
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If immigration reform becomes that toxic to the GOP, then I don’t see any way of them turning around the demographic trends that favor DEMs. The GOP is now the party of white dudes and families, which is an ever shrinking slice of America.
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I’d say the odds of a complete DEM sweep in 2016 (WH/House/Senate) just got a little higher.
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Thing is, in order to truly “bring home the bacon”, Cantor would have had to engage in exactly the sort of big spending that these Tea Party types rail against. Not that I expect any actual logic from the TPers, but you can’t be anti-big-government and then penalize your representative for not doing exactly what creates big government.
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He has to actually get in office first. His Democratic opponent is another professor from the same college, the district is not as radically conservative as many assume it to be, and there’s quite a broad backlash against Randian nutjobs even within the GOP.
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He has to actually get in office first.
I don’t think that’ll be a problem. Wiki show’s a pretty strong GOP track record, and I think that the DEM’s didn’t even actually have a primary election because of lack of interest. Check out (Democrat candidate) Trammell’s webpage, it doesn’t look like he’s a serious contender to me. But who the fuck knows, no one would have called this whole thing a week ago.
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Yea, but it’s easy to pretend to be anti-big-government while actually demanding all sorts of big government programs you want. Far easier than being consistent or re-evaluating your world view.
Quite correct about him not being “in office” yet. I was typing tired. 
I do know how the election process works, and don’t mind you catching the error.
I didn’t mean to be pedantic. I just want to give his Democratic opponent some props, because Trammell still hasn’t made much of a dent in the headlines. The contrast should be a great story: both profs at the same college, both a little bit outside their respective ends of the Overton window, probably both likely to be vulnerable to ridicule as well as both putting the spotlight on ideas that so far have only been covert dogwhistles in the public debate.
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No sweat, I wasn’t bashing you at all! I prefer for people to get it right, and would only ever think that I am allowed to correct others if I myself can be corrected.
I do think this will be interesting!
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Uh? What happened is the equivalent of Ed Milliband being deselected by his local Labour party on his constituency in order to select a rabid UNITE type or somebody of that sort.
It would not change politics in general, but boy, it would remembered for decades to come.
Well, they didn’t win the senate seat in 2008 so I don’t think you can write off a Democratic win. Generally electoral districts tend to go the same way from one election to another until they don’t. The past isn’t as great a predictor of the future as pundits make it out to be.
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