Cantor’s Lament
Eric Cantor fell last week.
He lost the Republican primary to David Brat, an obscure Economics
Professor from Randolph Macon College, despite outspending him by at least ten
times. His incumbency, his position as
House Majority Leader, his prodigious fundraising ability, and his power did
him absolutely no good.
He fell alone, seemingly without friends. Perhaps he had none. Before his political corpse was cold, his colleagues
in the House were scrambling to replace him as House Majority Leader.
As of this writing, Kevin McCarthy, the affable chief House
Whip, seems to have enough votes to replace Cantor, although Idaho’s hard right
Raul Labrador (among the hawkish of hawks on immigration) wants to challenge
him. The machinery of party politics
marches on. But in the quiet offices
where power is wielded and strategy set (and especially in the press that
reports on them) there has been a certain amount of confusion and concern.
Cantor wasn’t Dick Lugar of Indiana or Bob Bennett of Utah,
older Senators who were unexpectedly ambushed by Tea Party candidates, or even
72-year-old Thad Cochran of Mississippi, currently forced into a runoff. The Teas haven’t had the greatest success in
this election cycle, as older incumbent Republicans largely came forewarned and
forearmed. Yet Cantor, only 51, and in
all likelihood the heir apparent to Boehner when he retires, will be looking
for work in January.
So, how the heck did this happen?
Let’s start with the obvious. First, the Tea Party might be a little
bruised, but they aren’t dead. This
despite the fondest wishes of some of the GOP establishment (and, if they were
smart, Democrats who are actually interested in seeing government work instead
of just government.) Given the right
environment and the right candidate (or candidates) there’s absolutely no
reason why they can’t continue to win, or at the very least, throw a scare into
their opposition. Plenty of states remain fertile ground for their
movement. Texas has largely gone Tea, and
several others, including Kansas and Oklahoma, are so conservative that it’s
probably irrelevant. Tea Party energy
can still bring out the votes.
Second, gerrymandering really matters. To measure partisanship, political scientists
use the Cook Partisan Voting Index to see where any Congressional District lies
politically in comparison to the rest of the country. You calculate PVI by comparing the
district's average partisan share of the two-party presidential vote in the
past two presidential elections to the nation's average share of the same. To make that clearer, if Obama averaged a 52%
share over his two elections nationally, but a particular Congressional
District went for Obama by 57%, it would be a D+5.
That
doesn’t make election a certainty, you need to throw in additional
idiosyncratic factors such as the value of incumbency and personal popularity,
but the larger analysis still holds. A Congressional District that’s
rated “D+5” would be expected to yield about a 5% edge over the national trend
to the Democrat in the election. He
could still lose in a wave year, or because of a gaffe or some personal
scandal, but the probabilities are in his favor. Of course, politicians don’t like “probable”
when it comes to job security. They like
certainty. If D+5 sounds good, D+10
sounds better.
That is where the mapmakers come in. Getting from swing to
D+5 to D+10 is simply a function of the mapmaker’s creativity, and state
legislatures control redistricting. More
accurately, the party that controls the state legislature is the one that
controls redistricting. Usually,
redistricting is done after a national census, to reflect the changes in the
state’s Congressional allocation, but it doesn’t have to be. Texas did a massive redistricting in 2003
that flipped the delegation’s partisan tilt on its head.
Politicians do this because it works. Per Cook’s report, since 1998, the number of
D+5 to R+5 Congressional Districts has dropped from 164 to 90. Boehner owes his majority to redistricting
(the Democrats actually won the aggregate national congressional vote)--but
there is a potentially toxic side effect.
The “safer” your district is, the more insulated you get from any ideas
other than your own. And “safer” can be
an illusion, because being “more Republican” or “more Democratic” may just mean
you are enhancing the power of the ideological activists--the ones most likely
to vote in a primary or show up in a caucus or convention. They are also the ones most likely to demand
fealty.
Historically, incumbents didn’t care if zealous folk showed
up on primary day, because the two-party system was the only game in town. So, you pander a bit to the fire-eaters to
make them feel good, and then, if you think you have any chance of being in an
even competitive race, tack back to the center a bit. Incumbents just were never considered
endangered from within. One of the few primary
upsets of the order of magnitude of Cantor’s loss was in 1972 when Elizabeth
Holtzman defeated Emmanuel Celler, a fifty-year veteran of the House and
powerful Chair of the Judiciary Committee.
Celler never saw it coming. Only
in hindsight did some of the same issues that plagued Cantor (too much power,
too little concern for the needs at home) emerge.
So, why worry? Cantor
apparently didn’t, at least initially. He didn’t perceive the possibility of a viable
challenge from the right. In fact, his
people were more concerned that his fairly safe R District could trend Bluer
(or at least Purple, as Virginia as a whole was.) So, at the time of redistricting, and looking
at longer-term viability, they pushed to add even more conservative voters from
an adjoining, very conservative county, while subtracting votes from more
liberal Richmond precincts. The plan worked--the district is currently
rated R+10, which is pretty impregnable in all but the most extreme
circumstances. Provided, however, that
you get the nomination.
In this, Cantor stumbled. He had never been particularly good at
connecting on a personal level. Pretty
much all the “professional” qualities that made him effective (although
disliked) in Washington did him absolutely no good back at home among primary
voters. His power became a handicap
because he was perceived as loving Washington and the game too much, and his
District too little. His connections to
the financial services industry just showed him in the pockets of the bankers
(which would have been fine for your father’s GOP, but is decidedly less
attractive to the more populist Tea Party types.) Cantor had blocked
immigration reform, but even the smallest hint that he was in league with Facebook
and the tech industry to bring in highly skilled immigrants touched off the
anti-immigration forces. David Brat suddenly became a little bit of a cause
célèbre. Fox loved him, as did the
network of conservative talk-show hosts.
Laura Ingram parachuted in and wowed them.
So, last Tuesday, when that thin slice of his constituency,
all gerrymandered, radicalized, and distilled, looked at Eric Cantor, they saw
a stranger, not someone to give their loyalty to. It wasn’t even close.
There are few people who will mourn Cantor. Certainly I won’t—his cold-blooded
machinations sabotaged some efforts at bipartisanship. But the idea that smaller and smaller segments
of the voting population should be choosing a greater and greater number of the
people who lead us—that worries me a lot.
Government without accountability, whether from the Right or
the Left, leads inevitably to abuse.
That’s my lament.
June 16, 2014
Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)
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