Former U.S. House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor was recently interviewed about his 2014 primary loss in Virginia. He says he won a majority of the votes cast by Republicans, but says he lost because Democrats chose to vote in the Republican primary, and they voted against him. Virginia has an open primary. See the story here.
I would like to see an experiment with a blanket primary where the candidates had no ballot labels but the voters were registered into parties. The nonpartisan candidate who got the most votes from the GOP would be the Republican nominee. The candidate with the most Democratic votes would be the Democratic nominee. Most Green was Green, Most Libertarian was Libertarian, etc.
Perhaps Cantor is just expressing sour grapes. The Tea Party extremists got him.
Now we see why Eric has always been such a strong supporter of voter ID laws at the federal and state levels. If you let those poor brown types a chance to vote, well…you see what happens.
Virginia had an extremely competitive US Senate race in 2014, so we can used those results as indicator of sincere partisanship in Virginia, and in particular the 7th congressional district.
If Cantor’s claim that 23,000 Democrats voted for Brat in the primary, and that Cantor therefore received 68% of the GOP vote is true, then turnout among Republicans in the primary was 32%, and Democrats 23%. Cantor is delusional if he believes that in an election in which he outspent Brat 40:1, that the Democrats organized such a massive effort.
“Psst tell all your Democratic friends to vote in the Republican primary to embarrass Eric Cantor, and be sure to wear plaid shorts so they fit in”
But Brat’s best county was Hanover, which was also Gillespie’s best county. Assuming that Cantor received 68% of the Republican primary votes, then for Brat to win Hanover by the margin he did, Democrats would have had to turn out at a greater rate than Republicans for Brat to thump Cantor like he did.
Meanwhile in Richmond city and Henrico County where there are more Democrats (Gillespie lost the portion of VA-7 in Richmond, and only had a plurality in Henrico), Cantor did better than he did district wide. That is, in the places where he did better, there actually were enough Democrats who could have swayed the primary, they didn’t. So now we have to depend on the sneaky Democrats voting in the suburbs in June, and then voting back at their homes in November.
Cantor also did well in the rural counties.
The simple truth is that Brat did best exactly where you would expect him to do best, in the suburban counties around Richmond.
It is possible that there was crossover voting. The ratio of primary vote to Gillespie vote was higher in areas where there were more Democrats (or perhaps independents). But these sincere swingers, who merely wanted to vote would be more likely to vote for Cantor. True Republicans may have preferred Brat.
One would have to be extremely gullible to believe Cantor’s claims.
Jim Riley, you are being unfair in using factual evidence to rebut the claims of a member of the Republican party.