As we all know, Dave Brat's defeat of Eric Cantor hit the political world from somewhere around root level on the ground. But New York Times media critic David Carr writes that while the national press was blindslided by Brat's victory, the local press was well aware that Brat may have had something going.
Reporters and commentators might want to pause and wipe the egg off their faces before they go on camera to cluck-cluck about how Mr. Cantor, Republican of Virginia, missed signs of the insurgency that took him out. There was a lot of that going around, and the big miss by much of the political news media demonstrates that news organizations are no less a prisoner of Washington’s tunnel vision than the people who run for office.
All politics is local, which may explain why The Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Chesterfield Observer both took David Brat’s Tea Party challenge to Mr. Cantor seriously, but few of the publications inside the District that follow the majority leader’s every wiggle and wobble sensed that he was leaving the home fires dangerously unattended.
The Times-Dispatch ran an article on May 24--two weeks before the primary--that in hindsight looks like
a shot across Cantor's bow. It reveals that there was a growing sentiment that Cantor was taking his constituents for granted. In New Kent County, an exurb of Richmond that was drawn into Cantor's district after the 2010 census, a lot of voters said they hadn't seen much of Cantor beyond a campaign sign. And one of his ads, which branded Brat as an ivory tower librul professor, backfired spectacularly, and motivated more people to turn out for Brat. And to top that off, area tea partiers kept Cantor's allies from winning a majority of the Henrico County delegation to the state GOP convention, and also ousted his choice as district Republican chairman.
The Chesterfield Observer, a weekly covering that wealthy and mostly ruby-red county northeast of Richmond, reported that tea partiers have won a number of local victories there, and the anti-Cantor sentiment was so strong that at least one former Cantor loyalist said that people were "smelling blood in the water." Longtime state senator John Watkins was concerned enough to say a Brat win would destroy the Virginia GOP as presently constituted.
And yet, neither of these articles drew much notice in the national press. The only national piece on the race came in late April, when Politico reported that Cantor was finding himself having to put out some brush fires on his home turf. According to Carr, this may have been because few reporters who cover congressional politics want to be too far away from the capital in case a major story happens. This is magnified by the decline of the local press. Due to massive cutbacks, many local papers don't have the money to commission polls. As a result, Cantor's race was severely underpolled. This is presumably because national pollsters looked at Cantor's budget and assumed he'd drown Brat with advertising. But if they talked to the same people that the Observer's Jim McConnell interviewed for his story, the coverage might have been different. McConnell told Carr that the sense he got was that Cantor was seen as arrogant and unapprochable.
I read stories like this, and I'm reminded of how much I appreciate Daily Kos. I get to see local perspectives on stories that probably would never get much coverage otherwise. If only the Beltway press showed as much initiative, we might have seen this coming.