House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's Losing His Primary: No Politician is Safe! [UPDATE: He Lost!]
UPDATE: From Politico via Drudge, the raw vote totals on David Brat's surprising upset over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, 55.9 to 44.1 right now.
THE ORIGINAL POST:
Talking Points Memo is reporting on early, and shocking, exit polls early results from Virginia in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's primary bid:
House Minority Leader Eric Cantor's (R-VA) primary fight looked much more serious than many had thought.
With 52 percent of precincts reporting 41 minutes after polls closed primary challenger David Brat was leading Cantor, 57.9 percent to 42.1 percent.
Who is Brat? He is an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College. Brat was regarded as a long shot candidate but Cantor's campaign still spent over $1 million on advertising to stress that the top House Republican is a "strong conservative."
The Washington Post rightly spotted some momentum from the Tea Party-affiliated Brat last month.
It ain't over yet, but no political establishment is safe, it seems.
UPDATE: Associated Press is calling it: Cantor loses!
Interesting money in politics point via Tweet from John M Donnelly of Congressional Quarterly-Roll Call: in official campaign dollars Cantor outspent Brat $5.4 million to $200,000.
UPDATE II: In a positive sign about what one might expect from Brat in at least some respects, see him valorizing Justin Amash and Thomas Massie as the best graded members of the House via an ad from Organize Liberty that he tweeted. (It might have been more about Cantor's bad grade. But still, a nice hat tip to some decent congressmen.)
And as commenter Raven Nation noted below, Brat also has written about Ayn Rand in an academic/scholarly way. (Not sure what he said about her, but he's interested.)
Twitter feed of Zaid Jilani has lots about Brat's campaign manager, Zachary Werrell, who seems to be a libertarian movement-interested fellow of the LewRockwell.com variety--he describes himself as an "Austrian Economics geek" on his Twitter. Werrell's LinkedIn.
