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Post-Brat earthquake, more primaries to test anti-incumbent fever
Post-Brat earthquake, more primaries to test anti-incumbent fever
After pollsters wildly missed the mark by dismissing Dave Brat's candidacy as doomed, further primaries are imminent in New York, Oklahoma, Utah, Michigan, Missouri, Washington, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Florida, Rhode Island, and Louisiana.
Voters in Brat's Virginia district handed him the victory despite the advantages of incumbency enjoyed by powerful House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who spent over $5 million on his campaign to Brat's $123,000.
Brat upended the political world on a core platform of rolling back "crony capitalism," upholding the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution, addressing the national debt, and stopping illegal immigration. In his last Tweet before the election Brat wrote:
In seeking explanations for the historically unprecedented political earthquake, pundits remain at a loss for any compelling theory. Competent, vastly underfinanced candidates have challenged incumbents in primaries before, but have almost always lost as predicted. Brat's win contradicts the complaint that after the US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which opens the floodgate of corporate money to political candidates without restriction, incumbents would be all but impossible to unseat.
Brat quipped in his victory speech after the election, "dollars don't vote, you do."
In running on a platform of restoring the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, Brat ran in the first state in which citizens organized and responded to recent incursions on rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. The Virginia State Legislature has passed legislation which opposes the law passed in 2011 by Congress and the Obama administration which purports to allow the US military to arrest and detain US citizens without charge or trial, indefinitely. The Virginia Legislature passed a law overwhelmingly which forbids state agencies from cooperating with any federal attempt to exercise the indefinite detention law. The incumbent Cantor voted for the detention law, and Brat may have tapped into the ground level organizing that it sparked.
The nation's congressional primaries in off-presidential year elections are ordinarily very low turnout, as was Brat's, which magnifies the influence of the voters who turn out. Brat's vote total was 36,110 votes to Cantor's 28,898. In contrast, in the general election in 2012, for the same district, Obama garnered 163,331 votes to Romney's 222,915.
Off-year primaries are often citizens' best leverage for turning out an established incumbent, though they are ill-attended and usually little-reported on in the media, unless the race is deemed by pollsters to be "competitive."
Brat beat Cantor by a comfortable 11-point margin.
Brat said in an interview after the election that is was the continuing bailout of banks and financial institutions in the subprime mortgage crisis which motivated him to run, after Cantor voted repeatedly for these. Brat told Sean Hannity:
Post-Brat earthquake, more primaries to test anti-incumbent fever
After pollsters wildly missed the mark by dismissing Dave Brat's candidacy as doomed, further primaries are imminent in New York, Oklahoma, Utah, Michigan, Missouri, Washington, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Florida, Rhode Island, and Louisiana.
Voters in Brat's Virginia district handed him the victory despite the advantages of incumbency enjoyed by powerful House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who spent over $5 million on his campaign to Brat's $123,000.
Four days before the primary election, the Washington Post reported:
The discrepancies call into question the wisdom of news media using polls to decide to whom they will give coverage, which makes the job of underdog candidates even harder, while doing a disservice to voters.
Brat upended the political world on a core platform of rolling back "crony capitalism," upholding the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution, addressing the national debt, and stopping illegal immigration. In his last Tweet before the election Brat wrote:
Brat also made the repeal of Obamacare a top priority.
In seeking explanations for the historically unprecedented political earthquake, pundits remain at a loss for any compelling theory. Competent, vastly underfinanced candidates have challenged incumbents in primaries before, but have almost always lost as predicted. Brat's win contradicts the complaint that after the US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which opens the floodgate of corporate money to political candidates without restriction, incumbents would be all but impossible to unseat.
Brat quipped in his victory speech after the election, "dollars don't vote, you do."
In running on a platform of restoring the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, Brat ran in the first state in which citizens organized and responded to recent incursions on rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. The Virginia State Legislature has passed legislation which opposes the law passed in 2011 by Congress and the Obama administration which purports to allow the US military to arrest and detain US citizens without charge or trial, indefinitely. The Virginia Legislature passed a law overwhelmingly which forbids state agencies from cooperating with any federal attempt to exercise the indefinite detention law. The incumbent Cantor voted for the detention law, and Brat may have tapped into the ground level organizing that it sparked.
The nation's congressional primaries in off-presidential year elections are ordinarily very low turnout, as was Brat's, which magnifies the influence of the voters who turn out. Brat's vote total was 36,110 votes to Cantor's 28,898. In contrast, in the general election in 2012, for the same district, Obama garnered 163,331 votes to Romney's 222,915.
Off-year primaries are often citizens' best leverage for turning out an established incumbent, though they are ill-attended and usually little-reported on in the media, unless the race is deemed by pollsters to be "competitive."
Brat beat Cantor by a comfortable 11-point margin.
Brat said in an interview after the election that is was the continuing bailout of banks and financial institutions in the subprime mortgage crisis which motivated him to run, after Cantor voted repeatedly for these. Brat told Sean Hannity:
Brat shies away from the Tea Party label, and at times does not hesitate to use language that would make many in the establishment GOP uncomfortable. In his announcement speech that he would be running, he said:
