Slingshot

The Defeat of Eric Cantor

Lauren Cohen Bell, David Elliot Meyer, Ronald Keith Gaddie

• Publisher: CQ Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781506311944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"This is a book that needed to be written. Eric Cantor's defeat was not only shocking but it runs against everything we teach in our election courses. By extracting the lessons from Cantor's defeat, Slingshot helps to inform our more general understanding of campaigns & elections."
-Professor Kirby Goidel, Texas A&M University Incumbents don?t lose. So how did nationally prominent House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lose a primary battle to college professor David Brat, an unknown political rookie? In Slingshot: The Defeat of Eric Cantor, authors Lauren Cohen Bell, David Elliot Meyer and Ronald Keith Gaddie take advantage of exceptional behind-the-scenes access to the Brat campaign to explain the challenger's victory. They examine the essential need for elected officials to maintain strong support in their home districts and just how Cantor's focus on climbing the party ranks in Washington contributed to his loss. They also show how local "rules of the game" —particularly voter mobilization in this case—affect elections, and they explore the continuing impact of the Tea Party and its role in the factionalism of current Southern politics.

Chapter 1 The Cantor Case in Context

“Cantor may have not known or cared, but in his quest for national power he had burned one too many bridges back home.”

—Jeff Singer, Daily Kos¹

On June 10, 2014, Eric Cantor was beaten in the Republican primary for the Seventh Congressional District in Virginia. Lots of politicians lose primaries. But Cantor was the majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. He was a young, active, well-funded incumbent. No majority leader had lost reelection or renomination since the position was created in 1899. It was a historic defeat.

The defeat of Rep. Eric Cantor for renomination by economics professor David Brat defied the conventional assumptions of American politics. An incumbent lost. An incumbent lost a primary. The floor leader and architect of a durable GOP majority was ousted in his own primary. And it happened in a safe district that had been drawn to keep the incumbent in power for at least the next 10 years. Cantor’s defeat was foreseen by no one and was subsequently explained by everyone.

As a case, the primary in Virginia’s Seventh is an example of “the cautionary tale,” an illustration of how a good thing goes bad in politics. As such, it attracted the excessive use of hyperbole and analogy that dominates journalistic and pundit “studies” of elections. It tells us about how the media and new class of immediacy analysts engage an event and generate explanations for the public in the short term, when the glare of attention is most bright. The cautionary tale is nothing new in the human experience. We recount our history and mythology in epic tales. Great leaders emerge. Empires fall; others rise. There are villains and heroes. Giants are slain by the most humble of opponents, and underdogs prevail in the face of long odds. When powerful leaders fall, people seek metaphors and analogies to lend context to events that unfold before their own eyes. The fall of Eric Cantor pulls part and parcel from all of these—the vanquishing of the king in waiting, felled by his arrogance; the political giant felled by the slingshot stone of an insignificant and unarmored David; the man denied because he misjudged political circumstances and thus fell on the wrong side of history and its forces.

Journalists versus Political Scientists

Traditional journalists and the instant pundits of new age media engaged in a variety of speculative theories of why Cantor lost. Their speculations were often the typical “single-factor” explanations that are popular in journalistic circles, the effort to boil an unusual outcome down to a pithy 15-second cable news utterance or a 300-word Internet posting or a 140-character tweet. Eric Cantor was politically dead, and inquiries into how he died quickly concluded. Politics and journalists moved on to other primaries, other stories. For political scientists and political operators, the question of why a rich, powerful, well-heeled political leader fell remains to be answered.

Richard Fenno Jr. engaged the difference between journalists and political scientists regarding how they access a political story. In his book Watching Politicians, Fenno observes that journalists have inherently different goals than political scientists when they observe and write about politics. The journalist is often concerned with the immediacy of the story, of the topic as it appears on the surface. Journalists are there to test the candidate, to test the environment, and to not only inform it but also illuminate and shape public choices. There is the need to be first, to command the attention of the public. Journalists recount and explain the particular case before them, or, in the case of the punditry, try to explain an outcome and also derive from it broader lessons. Those efforts too might be accompanied by a desire to shape the choices of the broader public.

In contrast, political science approaches problems like Cantor’s defeat differently. American political science is concerned with the application of systematic methods to improve our understanding of democratic politics. Often this involves using large numbers of cases to explain politics. We survey the public or collect information on many elections or examine numerous decisions to try to determine the relationship between explanations and outcomes. But American political science also finds value in the illustrative case study. It is possible to drill into a case and find evidence that is representative of things that are generally true or to build theories for later testing with additional data. We can take data from the case and then see whether the data behaves as expected in similar cases. American political science places different explanations for an outcome into competition to see which offers the most leverage on the problem. Often those competing explanations to be tested are advanced by journalists, pundits, politicians, and the lay public. The political scientist is there to understand, to explain what is happening or what has happened in order to identify and craft more generalizable and testable propositions of politics.

The defeat of Cantor presents an opportunity to apply political science tools to a rare event in order to illustrate important aspects of American politics. Political science can test competing explanations and home in on both the indicators and explanations of the Cantor loss as well as its representativeness of contemporary politics. In this book, we interrogate the Cantor case in the context of other cases and data to see how typical or unusual it is. In doing so, we shed light on the state of American politics in the middle of the second decade of the second millennium.

Placing Cantor’s Defeat into Context

To understand the Cantor loss, we need to ascertain whether the case is exceptional. Most often, political science seeks more data through multiple cases in order to create general models of politics. In this instance, we confront a different type of question—is the Cantor defeat unusual, or is it typical of incumbent defeats within their own parties. If the latter, then existing theories of politics are likely sufficient to understand what happened. If the former, however, then extant theories may be revealed to be insufficient, and the Cantor case can help us to refine them.

Before getting too much further into the Cantor story, however, it is necessary to provide some background information about candidate selection in general and how the nominating process works in Virginia more specifically.

Nominating Candidates

The specific structure of a state’s candidate selection system determines in part the nature of the primary electorate. The combination of institutional constraints and the makeup of the primary constituency can have significant effects on who is selected as a party’s nominee for the general election. In general, there are three types of nominating processes: caucuses, which permit small groups of party elites to select the party’s candidate; open primaries, in which any registered voter may participate and cast a vote for his or her preferred candidate; and closed primaries, in which only members of a party may cast ballots to determine that party’s nominee. Modifications to the open primary abound as well; for example, blanket primaries put all candidates for office on a single ballot regardless of party affiliation, while some primaries that would be otherwise closed allow for same-day party registration so that the voter may ultimately select whichever partisan ballot he or she prefers on that day.

It is well documented that voters who participate in the nomination phase of a multistage election are different from general election voters, but the particular form of nominating process adopted by a state also has implications for the numbers and types of voters who participate in the nominating of party candidates. Voter turnout is highly variable in primary elections. The extant literature on primary elections suggests that voter turnout in these contests is affected by perceptions of the competitiveness, with more voters going to the polls when they perceive the election to matter or when one party is so dominant in a county or state that voters recognize the primary as their only opportunity to affect the election outcome.

In circumstances in which the primary election may be the only opportunity to affect the result of the general election, crossover voting may occur and may affect turnout rates. Research demonstrates that voters from the nondominant party may desire to nominate a candidate closer to their preferred ideological or partisan position, recognizing that the candidate selected in the dominant party’s primary will likely be the winner of the general election contest. As one study of California’s blanket primary notes to the extent that voters cross over, “In general it seems that the decision to cross over in primary elections is largely motivated by sincere and not sophisticated motivations.”² That is not to say that there are not partisans from the out party that are interested in sabotaging the other party’s nominating contest, but in general, the literature on crossover voting has concluded that such calculated behavior is unlikely to have a significant impact on election results. As political scientists Elisabeth Gerber and Rebecca Morton note, “While both strategic and sincere crossover voting are possible in these very open primary systems, sincere crossover by moderate voters dominates and leads to the election of moderate candidates from both parties.”³

Who turns out may also be affected by the particular arrangements of the nominating phase. Caucus participants tend to be highly motivated and engaged partisans, and caucuses produce the most ideological candidates.⁴ Open primaries are expected to produce the most moderate candidates, owing to their broad and inclusive nature. Crossover voting by partisans from the other party is also possible and most likely in open primary systems. By comparison, closed primaries tend to produce more ideological candidates since the voters selecting them are themselves likely to be more ideological.⁵ Furthermore, who votes in primaries is often determined by candidate-specific factors. As Fenno noted nearly four decades ago, since party labels are neutralized in most primary elections, primary election voters tend to have a deeper attachment to the specific candidates in the race than do general election voters, who may be motivated simply by partisan considerations. As political scientist Barry Burden notes, “Because primary voters are often partisan diehards who care a great deal about policy positions, they prefer candidates with noncentrist positions.”⁶

The Rules of the Game in Virginia

The Commonwealth of Virginia provides few rules for political parties with regard to nominating their candidates for public office. Section 24.2-509 of the Virginia Code makes party leaders responsible for determining how to select their nominees for office.⁷ This means that from election to election, the method of selecting the party’s candidate may vary. Contributing to the parties’ indecision about how best to nominate candidates is the fact that Virginia does not register voters by party. As a result, the incentives for the state and local parties to hold nominating caucuses are increased because when a party does hold a primary election, any registered voter in the relevant jurisdiction may participate. At the same time, caucuses are expensive and must be paid for by the party itself, whereas the party does not pay to nominate its candidate through state-run primary elections; this argues against caucuses when party coffers are running low or when the party’s nominee is a foregone conclusion. Complicating matters further, when only one candidate expresses a desire to run for office, the party may simply nominate this person through whatever internal means it wishes, such as during the party’s own convention or by a vote of the central committee for the relevant jurisdiction.

Even within the same election, the process to nominate a statewide candidate may vary from the process to nominate a local candidate. And since the two major parties in Virginia make decisions about the candidate selection process independently, they frequently choose different selection methods, such as one party but not both will hold a primary to select a candidate. The fact that the parties often use different procedures in the same election cycle to select their candidates can be confusing for voters in Virginia, who sometimes are called upon to participate in primary elections but often are not.

The result is that Virginia selects its candidates in a hodgepodge of caucuses and primaries. In 2005, for example, Republicans nominated Jerry Kilgore for the 2005 gubernatorial election via primary. In 2009, the Democrats held a primary election to allow voters to select their preferred candidate from the three who had filed to run. But that same year, Republicans nominated Bob McDonnell as their candidate during their convention; McDonnell had been the only Republican to file for the office. In 2013, Virginia Republicans again opted to use a convention to nominate the then attorney general Ken Cuccinelli over the then lieutenant governor Bill Bolling. Bolling likely would have won the nomination had a primary election been used to select the party’s candidate, but conservatives packed the party meeting where the nominating procedure was decided. The choice of the convention by the party leadership in 2012 was itself widely perceived as a victory for Cuccinelli, the more conservative candidate in the race, and indeed the convention almost certainly assured his nomination.⁸ Cuccinelli’s nomination over Bolling, who was favored by establishment partisans, contributed to the efforts by establishment Republicans to keep conservatives from influencing the outcome of local nominating contests during spring 2014. These establishment efforts, led by Cantor supporters and campaign staffers, galvanized conservatives against Cantor.

Beyond the varied methods used to nominate candidates, Virginia’s lack of party registration has been a perennial issue, particularly for the state’s Republicans. Since the mid-1990s, the state’s Republican Party has from time to time required voters in Republican primaries to pledge their support to the Republican candidate in the subsequent general election. These highly controversial “loyalty oaths” have been widely panned whenever they have been proposed...