Tea Party’s whiny tantrum: How a small group’s rage explains Eric Cantor’s demise

Pundits are searching and stretching to divine meaning from Cantor's downfall — but the real explanation is simple

ELIAS ISQUITH

Last Tuesday was not supposed to be one of the most important days of Eric Cantor’s life. Defeating an amateur politician like David Brat — a professor of economics at Randolph-Macon College and an Ayn Rand enthusiast — in a low-turnout primary election is not usually the kind of thing a seasoned veteran like Cantor makes a point to remember. He was the House majority leader, after all, and he was relatively young and healthy to boot. Barring some unforeseeable catastrophe, his chances of becoming the first-ever Jewish speaker of the House were pretty darn good. For much of the past few months, worrying about Brat was probably not at the top of his list.

But then the results started coming in, and before anyone could even transition from shock to disbelief, the Associated Press had called it. David Brat had pulled off one of the biggest upsets in recent political history, and Eric Cantor’s political career was done. He announced his plan to resign as majority leader one day later.

In the rush of speculation and conjecture that followed Cantor’s defeat, pundits and politicos struggled to be the first to offer the definitive explanation for the surprise result. Surely it could not have been just another random phenomenon in a universe comprised of nothing but. There had to be a reason. And that reason’s profundity had to be roughly equivalent to the unexpectedness of the outcome itself. So Cantor lost because he wasn’t a libertarian; or because he was too libertarian; or because he was too much a politician; or because he wasn’t a politician enough. No matter the answer, its implications were universal, and its consequences were sweeping.

What was lost in the hubbub was the importance of a single number, one that is impressive at first but is rather tiny when placed in the proper context: 36,110. The number of voters who marked their ballot or pulled that lever for David Bart, the total group of people from which pundits in a land of well more than 300 million are trying to divine some revelatory socio-political secret. That’s less than 40,000 — around .01 percent of the entire U.S. population. A smaller figure than what used to be the norm for motor vehicle accident fatalities every year.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/06/14/tea_partys_whiny_tantrum_how_a_small_groups_rage_explains_eric_cantors_demise/