Dave Brat was viewed as more of a nuisance than a threat. Behind Cantor's campaign meltdown

ASHLAND, Va. — From the moment polls opened Tuesday, it could not have been clearer that Eric Cantor gave no mind to the idea he could lose.

In the morning, he huddled with lobbyists at a Starbucks on Capitol Hill. In the afternoon, a campaign aide in Richmond emailed Cantor allies in Washington to report that Election Day plans were going swimmingly. The Cantor campaign organized volunteers to meet at the Republican National Committee to travel to the district for a get-out-the-vote effort that was billed as a way to “build up your resume campaign credentials,” with the added perk of getting a chance to “meet the majority leader” and celebrate at his “victory party,” which would feature a bar and catering stations.


And in the evening, Steve Stombres, Cantor’s longtime chief of staff who is also a local politician in Northern Virginia, attended a Fairfax City Council meeting, where wastewater treatment and public employee retirement plans were on the docket.

Within hours, Cantor’s political career came to a crashing end, as a crowd of dejected supporters, draining beer and wine from the bar, watched in disbelief while Cantor gave his concession speech.

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The failure of one of the most powerful politicians in the country to recognize a threat from a college professor and political neophyte contributed to Cantor’s stunning loss on Tuesday. But interviews with dozens of Cantor’s current and former staffers, veteran GOP strategists, outside groups and constituents portray a campaign that was bedeviled from the start by Cantor’s preoccupation with reaching the pinnacle of House leadership. He was tending more to a constituency on Capitol Hill and his monied supporters, voters said, than to the actual constituents in Virginia’s 7th District, which is in and around Richmond.

An examination of the campaign also found that Dave Brat was viewed as more of a nuisance than a threat, someone who could be swatted away in a barrage of TV ads and mailings. In example after example, Cantor failed to adhere to campaign basics such as assuaging advocacy groups in the district and mollifying tea partyers. While alarm bells should have been going off, the congressman was reassured by his pollster, whose final internal showed him winning with around 62 percent.

“This is the difficulty of trying to be a national leader,” said former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, once chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, who served alongside Cantor. “It’s the inherent conflict … Instead of going back to his district every weekend, he was out around the country helping other people. That takes its toll after a while. All of a sudden he becomes ‘part of the problem.’”

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Taking reelection for granted

A few weeks out from the election, the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun rights group, pressed Cantor’s campaign to perform what they saw as a routine request: reaffirm his support for the Second Amendment by completing a simple questionnaire. It was the kind of request any typical Republican running in a conservative district would answer.

But Cantor ignored the group, which claims 26,000 supporters, as he had for years. The congressman never responded to the survey or its plea to relocate an annual GOP event in the district from a pavilion that banned concealed guns.

The Defense League responded by making robocalls to Republican voters throughout the district questioning his commitment to the right to bear arms, a staple issue for many GOP voters here.

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The slight, his critics argued, was emblematic of Cantor’s broader attitude that he was untouchable.

“We were tired of being treated like mushrooms,” said Philip Van Cleave, the group’s president, who lives in the district. “His chickens came home to roost.” Cantor’s camp viewed the league as a fringe organization; the majority leader was endorsed by the NRA.

Meanwhile, Cantor became an ideological mystery, current and former aides said, allowing an opening for Brat to say the congressman had strayed from the Republican Party. Cantor was constantly repositioning himself: from immigration reform opponent, to staunch supporter, to opponent once again; from the combative conservative voice at the leadership table, to a walled-off leader, concentrating only on broadly popular issues; from Speaker John Boehner’s foe to his best friend.

Politically, Cantor was under pressure to change his views and approach. As Cantor became more prominent, and more of a target for Democrats like President Barack Obama, his internal polling showed his popularity in the district sinking.

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Meanwhile, Cantor’s ambitions increasingly kept him in Washington and away from the district, associates said. The 51-year-old Republican was heir apparent to Boehner — and had a travel schedule and entourage to match — but those trappings of power backfired.

Virginia GOP Chairman Pat Mullins, a Cantor constituent who has known him for years, said Cantor “just wasn’t in the district as much as he used to be. Dave Brat was there.”

His loss was broad based, but the heart of the resistance to Cantor was here in Hanover County, north of Richmond, which includes the Randolph-Macon College where Brat teaches and there is a deep vein of frustration with the direction of the country. The majority leader lost each of its 37 precincts, pulling just one-third of the vote in the county — worse than his performance anywhere else.

“I’m really glad he did,” said Steve Travis, 64, a retired Richmond police officer who was shopping at the Green Top sporting goods store. “It’s time for some new blood, somebody besides the ole Republicans and Democrats.”

A sign off the turnpike in nearby Mechanicsville calls Cantor “The Lying King,” with a picture of a squished lion, a harsh parody of the movie.

Several people mentioned the ever-present Capitol Police detail that ferried Cantor and made him feel insulated.

“The protective force around him didn’t want him coming into some of these [rural] areas,” said Mullins, who lives in the district.

Losing his grip on the local party

A month before the election on May 10, delegates at a district-level convention booed Cantor and voted to oust his close confidant Linwood Cobb from the district chairmanship. That meant that the congressman’s machine could not use the official party machinery quite the way it had in the past.

One warning sign that went unheeded was when the party needed to move its 7th District convention from a high school gym to a Hilton to accommodate all the people signed up to participate – many new to the process and expressly anti-Cantor.

But Cantor’s team again downplayed it, arguing that the loss of the chairmanship was narrow and the electorate in a higher-turnout primary would be much friendlier.

“When they lost Linwood, he was their eyes and ears,” said a top Republican operative. “Without the party machinery in the district, they couldn’t get the bodies out.”

A pivotal moment in the campaign came when the Cantor campaign, with an overwhelming cash advantage, decided to run attack ads in April that called Brat “a liberal college professor.”

“When Tim Kaine demanded a billion-dollar tax increase, real Republicans fought back and we won,” a female narrator said in one of the 30-second spots. “As an appointed economic adviser to Tim Kaine, Brat could have fought back. He could have done something. Instead, David Brat said that was no place for those kinds of political opinions. Liberal college professor David Brat didn’t stand up to Tim Kaine. How can we ever trust him to stand up to Barack Obama?”

A Richmond Republican insider who backed Cantor had met Brat and said the description didn’t match the person.

“It didn’t pass the smell test,” he said. “They made him sympathetic and let voters realize that Cantor had a challenger. It gave him oxygen.” Brat argued that the ads increased his name ID in the district.

Brat did not run his first TV ad until one week before the primary, and it only aired about 60 times. About half of Cantor’s ads, aired more than one thousand times, were attacks.

Curse of redistricting

In a cruel twist for Cantor, a redrawing of his district lines after the 2010 census made his district more conservative. It presumably assured his safe reelection every two years — but it may have accelerated his defeat.

A Republican operative said that Cantor’s team pushed to add conservative New Kent County into the eastern end of the district. But people there, like the district broadly, rejected Cantor.

“They made the assumption that Republicans would be more understanding than the general electorate,” he said.

Cantor pulled just 37 percent in New Kent, losing the county by 500 votes.

A close Cantor friend said adding new voters into the district who did not know the congressman when he was more plugged in locally made it easier for critics to caricature and misrepresent him.

“The vast majority of people seemed prepared to believe the worst about Eric and the best about Dave Brat,” the friend said Thursday. “They didn’t know who either one of them were.”

District lines aside, in retrospect, Cantor was not a natural fit for the district, even people aligned with the majority leader said after his loss.

In 2000, as a state legislator, he was the handpicked successor of incumbent Rep. Tom Bliley. He inherited the congressman’s organization, yet despite enjoying a massive fundraising advantage, he beat state Sen. Stephen Martin by only 263 votes in the GOP primary.

The district has always had an evangelical and socially conservative bent. Cantor, the only Jewish Republican in Congress, was not hurt by overt anti-Semitism, observers say. But Martin in 2000 and Brat in 2014 could more easily tap into the network of evangelicals in the district.

“His comfort zone is raising dollars on Wall Street and K Street,” said another GOP strategist. “He was much more of a corporate Republican when the district activists are not.”

Cantor’s pollster, John McLaughlin, helped foster the sense of complacency among Cantor and his allies. McLaughlin’s final survey just after Memorial Day had Cantor leading by 34 points. His firm has a history of publicizing off-the-mark numbers, including in Virginia just last cycle, but he had the confidence of the incumbent. Part of the problem: He underestimated the size and composition of the electorate. In the 2012 congressional primary, about 46,000 people voted; on Tuesday, 65,000 did.

Of course, none of these troubles were apparent — to Cantor or anyone else — until the ultimate damage was done. Indeed, some Cantor staffers didn’t realize their boss was in peril until around 7 p.m., when the first returns were reported.

When Cantor arrived at the Westin in Richmond for the celebration, he was whisked into an elevator and ushered upstairs.

And when the result was final, his five-minute concession speech delivered, Cantor left the stage and was ushered by Capitol Police officers to an awaiting black SUV. One Cantor ally slammed a ballroom door shut on reporters, so Cantor didn’t have to answer questions. A Cantor staffer tried to prevent photographers from taking photos of Cantor entering the car.

The next day, Cantor appeared before a throng of reporters in the Capitol to announce he would step down as majority leader at the end of July.

“I know that my team worked incredibly, incredibly hard,” Cantor said. “And in the end, the voters chose a different candidate.”

CORRECTION: The original version of this story said the Republican National Committee organized the buses. The Cantor campaign did.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Libby Isenstein @ 06/13/2014 07:24 AM CORRECTION: The original version of this story said the Republican National Committee organized the buses. The Cantor campaign did.