Wow — Eric Cantor lost his primary, by a large margin. Amazing.
Obviously I know nothing about his district, or what exactly happened. Fivethirtyeight does have something interesting, pointing out that Tea Party upsets seem correlated with the second dimension of DW-nominate, the Poole-Rosenthal system that maps roll call votes into an implied position space. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I might come back to this, but basically I’m telling you that I remain a serious nerd.
What I think I might add to this discussion is a note on incentives: Cantor’s loss is part of a process that could well unravel movement conservatism as we know it.
Think Progress just ran a piece that parallels Cantor and Lindsey Graham’s approaches to immigration. The jist is that Graham had a position on immigration and backed it up by proposing legislation, while Cantor said he had a position but did nothing about it. Others point to Cantor’s perceived lack of purity as being the cause of his loss in a Tea Party district. http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2014/06/10/3447419/eric-cantor-davi…
