“That’s a nice story, but it’s a novel, right? It certainly bears little resemblance to what really happened. Cantor beat himself, and Brat had NO help from the Tea Party. The press tried to whip up the immigration angle, but that wasn’t the reason Dave Brat won.”
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Sorry, you need to research this more. The defeat of Cantor and, prior to that, the RINOs in the local GOPe machinery, was done by local constitutional conservatives who tired of the RINO lies & duplicity. It was basically a well thought out uprising by local conservatives.
These LOCAL conservatives fought and took back the local GOP (along with the Uber-duplicitous Cantor’s seat) from the corrupt GOPe. We owe these Virginia patriots a lot. And we should be copying their strategy and tactics across our great nation.
Nope. I was in the middle of it. Cantor was lazy, and instead of actually campaigning during the primary, decided since he had so much money he would just out ad Dave Brat. Bad move for Cantor. Since Brat was a newcomer with no record, Cantor didn't have much to work with in his ads, so he lied about the record of Brat. The folks who paid attention to the lies in his ads were exactly the same folks who rouse themselves to vote in primaries. Every time they heard another ad by Cantor calling Brat a liberal professor who helped Tim Kaine raise taxes, the more pissed off these folks got, because it wasn't true.
Do you understand? Cantor paid for his own loss.
Yes, there were local conservatives that were early Brat supporters and some of these folks may have been to a Tea Party rally, but while Brat asked for help from the Tea Party, they sent NOT ONE PENNY!
Immigration was but one talking point that Brat used in his stump speech, but it would be quite a stretch to call it a focus of his campaign.