By now, anyone reading this already knows that Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor lost his primary election Tuesday June 10 to David Brat.
I'm writing this from Alaska and I don't know much about Cantor's district. But I do know a little about Sen. Murkowski's successful write-in campaign in 2010 after she lost to a Tea Party candidate in the primary.
My basic question about the Virginia primary was about turnout. I'll report what I found there first and then speculate on whether could Cantor win a write-in campaign in November, and what it might mean here in Alaska.
Here are the official election results from the Virginia State Government page:
As you can see, there were
65,008 votes cast. (I don't know about absentee, but this is 100% of the votes cast Tuesday, apparently.)
So, what percent of registered voters in this district voted?
The Virginia State Board of Elections website has a February 1, 2014 report on the number of registered voters in District 7.
Virginia District 7
2/1/2014
#of Precincts in District =234
# of Active Voters: =473,032
# of Inactive Voters =31,863
# of Total Voters =504,895
I'm sure that somewhere they have this information broken down by party, but I didn't find it and it's not important enough to spend too much time on. And it was an open primary without much happening in the other races. I'm just trying to get some ballpark idea of what happened.
If we take the active voters (473,032) in the district, then about 14% of the registered voters in the district participated. And about 8% of the district's registered voters, voted for David Brat.
For Cantor, the obvious deficiency was not getting his voters out. Given the tone of the coverage of this race - "In an enormous political upset . . " for example - Cantor's supporters probably figured they didn't have to go to the polls.
Nathaniel Downes at Addicting Information attributes the loss to gerrymandering:
"The cause for this major upset boils down to the GOP’s overuse of gerrymandering. By carving out safe districts for their candidates in the general elections, the Republicans engineered a situation whereby fringe candidates within their own party now can cause primary challenges which can not only force out incumbents, it can enable for candidates who would do damage to the nation through their anti-government rhetoric to win seats in government."
The district did change in 2013 - since Cantor's last race - and it seems to have acquired a leg, so to speak, but probably overlaps the old district quite a bit. But Downes' point is that it's more Republican than it was, not that there are different constituents. David Jarman in his Daily Kos on this race also comments on gerrymandering. Here are what I found as the old and new district borders:
District 7 Before 2013 Redistricting
Virginia District 7 after 2013
David Jarman's Daily Kos piece today gives more detail on the redistricting and comes to the same conclusion I did - that it's not that much different than before. He thinks the problem was that Cantor just didn't pay enough attention to his district.
What about the Democrat? And is the Murkowski write in tactic that reelected the sitting Senator after she lost the primary to a Tea Party candidate in Alaska workable for Cantor? And how does this affect Alaska? Read below the fold.
What about the Democrat? Democrats really weren't expecting to be players in November it seems. Downes (the guy at Addicting Info) writes
"The original Democratic candidate for the district, Mike Dickenson failed to file the paperwork necessary to be on the ballot, although there has been some push for a write-in campaign. So, it looks like the field for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District is going to be dominated by the Tea Party and Libertarian candidates this year.
UPDATE It turns out that the Democratic Party of Virginia has pushed forward a candidate late yesterday, Jack Trammell. Like Dave Brat, he is a professor at Randolph-Macon College, and has not yet even gotten his campaign website up and running yet. For now it redirects to ActBlue, the Democratic PAC focused on internet fundraising."
Ballotopedia says
"Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, will face Democrat Jack Trammell, who is also a Randolph-Macon professor, Libertarian James Carr and write-in candidate Mike Dickinson, who failed to earn the Democratic endorsement."
So, if all that is correct,
1. the Republicans have a Tea-Party candidate, David Brat, who upset the House Republican Majority leader, Cantor
2. there's a Libertarian candidate, James Carr, who presumably would eat into Brat's votes
3. a last minute Democrat, Jack Trammel, a fellow faculty member at Randolph-Macon College with David Brat which gives new meaning to "campus politics'
4. a write-in candidate who failed to file as a Democrat, Mike Dickenson
Will Cantor Pull a Murkowski?
In Alaska, when Sen. Lisa Murkowski lost the primary in 2010 to Joe Miller, there was a little known, but surprisingly charismatic, Democrat on the ballot to oppose Miller. National Republicans supported the primary winner, Joe Miller, but Murkowski was able to raise over $1 million from a newly formed PAC made up of Alaska Native corporations. Sufficient Democrats voted for her on the grounds that Scott McAdams, the Democrat, couldn't win, and that Murkowski would be far better than Miller.
But Murkowski is a not a right-wing ideologue; she's even a bit of a maverick on social issues and wasn't so hard for Democrats to vote for.
Ultimately, Miller lost the race himself. There were issues about him going into other people's computer fileswhen he worked for the Fairbanks North Star Borough, and he admitted he lied about it. He had a posse of body guards who handcuffed a persistent journalist after a middle school campaign function. And he claimed that if theEast Germans could secure their border, we could too.
There was a very low turnout in the Virginia primary, low enough that a fringe candidate's supporters could outvote the House majority leader's supporters. Are there enough more out there to defeat Cantor if there were a larger turnout? Or has Cantor alienated enough constituents that they won't rally for him as they did for Murkowski? Cantor would seem less palatable to Democrats than Murkowski is. Would enough Democrats support a Cantor over Brat and the last minute Democratic candidate? And there are Libertarians who could funnel votes from Brat. Will Brat repeatedly shoot himself in the foot as Miller did against Murkowski?
Those are factors Cantor would be wise to consider if he's thinking about a Murkowski write-in campaign. Cantor is certainly easier to spell than Murkowski. (She handed out plastic bracelets with her name on them.) Given that Brat won with only 8% of the registered voters, and given the Murkowski precedent, I'm sure Cantor will be tempted.
What Does This Mean For Alaska?
My guess is that Joe Miller (the Tea Party candidate who's polling third in the Republican primary, but beat sitting Sen. Murkowski in the 2010 Republican primary) is a happy man today and that his Tea Party supporters are energized. The thought that Brat was outspent by Cantor almost 40 - 1 will motivate supporters of a lot of financially marginal candidates.
But campaigning in Alaska is much more expensive. Virginia's 7th Congressional district is only about 100 miles long and not nearly as wide. You can drive to any voter's house in the district in a few hours at most. We have state house districts bigger than the whole state of Virginia. And many villages aren't on the road system. Hell, our state capital isn't on the road system (but you can 'drive' there via ferry.) Unless you have a pilot's license or a friend who does, getting around the state is very expensive. And the whole state of Alaska has only 489,294 registered voters, just 16,000 more than Virginia's 7th district.
I suspect that the coalition that elected Murkowski may well reelect Begich in the end, especially if Miller is the Republican candidate again, or, if he loses and, as is rumored, he runs as an independent. But it will be close. The big national conservative money (and so far, more has been spent by PAC's on the Alaska senate race than in any other state) is backing relatively recent Alaskan Dan Sullivan in the US Senate race, but Begich is a tenacious and savvy campaigner. While Alaska is a red state and there are more Republicans than Democrats, there are even more people registered as undeclared and non-partison. It will be about who gets their supporters to the polls.
An earlier version of this was posted at What Do I Know?