"The Tea Party is coming! The Tea Party is coming! The Tea Party is winning! The Tea Party is winning!" If you were buying into what the mainstream media was selling today, you’d might be convinced that a modern-day ‘David vs Goliath’ narrative was the reason behind House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s unprecedented GOP primary defeat. In reality, the voices from Twitter point to a much more plausible cause and effect.
Folks like @RiskyLiberal and @TimGrieve believe the real reason for Cantor being deposed by Tea Party newbie and little-known professor David Brat was a strategic and conscious move by the Democratic party turning out the vote in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District race.
Flagging the Polls
Strangely enough, surveys indicated, going into this primary election that Cantor had a clear lead — 62 percent to 28 percent, with 11 percent of voters undecided, according to the Washington Post. This poll sampling came from 400 likely Republican voters on May 27 and 28, and was conducted by the John McLaughlin & Associates group.
Carrying a margin of error of +/-4.9 percentage points, the actual results showed an incredulous wider margin, undercounting Brat’s support by approximately 27 percentage points and overestimating Cantor’s by 17 points. Again social media types were the first to widely mock these inaccurate polling results on Twitter, with tweets that included zingers like those of @jcbdraco.
Dem DEMS turned the Vote on a Dime!
The answer lies in the actual voter count. While the primary held in 2012 drew only 45,000 voters, this time around, 65.000 folks showed up at the polling booths. That represented almost a 50 percent increase in voter turnout.
Why the increase? All you have to do is look to the left and follow the Twitter trail that points to Democrats like Ben Jones urging his fellow party members to vote for Brat versus Cantor.
Ben Jones of “Cooter” fame!
Perhaps helped by the fact that Jones himself was defeated by Cantor in 2002 when he attempted to win the Republican’s Virginia district, his influence seemed to sway a lot of Democrats to turn out the vote against Cantor, this go-around. Here @SKHR62 thanks the Congressman for getting out the vote.
Pollster McLaughlin also cited the "Cooter" factor – the fact that former Rep. Ben Jones, a Georgia Democrat who played Cooter in The Dukes of Hazzard, had also written an open letter urging Democrats to vote for Brat. Here @jonnew indicates MSNBC was one of the first news networks to connect the dots in that regard.
Playing Field Leveled
So did David slay Goliath? Yes, with a little help from his frenemies across the aisle. Apparently money doesn’t buy every election. With Cantor out-flanking Brat, $5.7 million to $231,000 in campaign funding, this Tea Party candidate can point to "God" and an "unbelievable miracle" as the reasons he won this race — but in actuality — it had a lot more to do with being in the right place, at the right time.
Jack TrammelNow that the playing field has been leveled, Brat will go up against Democrat Jack Trammel, who ironically is a professor at the same university as himself — Randolph-Macon College. And according to recent reports, not that students alone will determine the outcome of that race — but if they did — it looks like they would be voting for Trammel vs. Brat, who received a higher rating on the online survey website, Rate My Professor. But, as we just witnessed, polls are not always that accurate – so we’ll be looking to the Twittersphere once again to check on which direction the wind is blowing — when that eventful election rolls around.
