Eric Cantor is toast

Cantor had stepped down as Majority Leader earlier this week, and was replaced by Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). He hadn’t previously mentioned any plans to leave Congress early, and didn’t specify why he was doing so in a Friday op-ed about the decision.

Cantor has endorsed Dave Brat, who defeated him in the primary. Check out Vox’s coverage of Cantor’s loss here. And you can watch Cantor’s farewell address to the House, delivered Thursday, below:

OpenSecrets’ breakdown of Eric Cantor’s campaign spending reveals that it spent $168,000 on steakhouses. His opponent only spent $200,000 in total:

David Brat’s work at Randolph-Macon College gives one more clue to who he is. Aside from chairing the economics department, he is director of the BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism program. In this program, underwritten by the bank BB&T’s charitable foundation and inaugurated in 2008, colleges teach a curriculum that promotes free-market economics, and notably, the ideas of Ayn Rand.

Allison added that he was frustrated intellectuals had “dismissed” free-market economic ideas. This is no casual cause for Allison; he is the president and CEO of the Cato Institute and also sat on the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute, a think tank that promotes the objectivist writer’s ideas. Allison adds in this article that Atlas Shrugged was usually included in the curriculum for the program.

Dave Brat, an economics professor from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, came out of nowhere to defeat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a primary Tuesday. Who is Brat?

6) Brat’s students love him — and think he’s hot. RatemyProfessor.com shows Brat is pretty well-liked as a professor. He gets a 3.4 overall, and he even merits a chili pepper for his good looks. “He’s so charming and really knows how to incorporate real world examples to keep the class exciting and relateable (sic),” writes one student. “Plus he’s total eye candy!!”

Jonathan Lawrence retired in 2013 after eight years as Nancy Pelosi’s chief of staff. In that position, he spent a lot of time working with his counterparts in John Boehner’s office. On his blog, he imagines how they’re feeling tonight:

Lawrence also sees an upside for campaign-finance reformers in Cantor’s ouster. It’s proof that money doesn’t always buy victory:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor spent almost a million dollars in his unsuccessful effort to stop David Brat’s primary challenge. Brat campaigned as an orthodox conservative, but that didn’t stop Cantor from portraying him as a “liberal college professor” with ties to Democratic Governor Tim Kaine.

These ads were too much for FactCheck.org, which said that Cantor “misrepresents his primary opponent’s role on a state economic forecasting board.” It notes that the board Brat served on focused on technical economic issues. Brat never advised Kaine on tax policy, as Cantor’s ads imply.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor just lost a historic primary race — to an economist. Prof. David Brat chairs the Department of Business and Economics at Randolph-Macon College, a liberal arts school in Ashland, Virginia. Vox read over some of his academic research, and it helps give you a sense of what the politician at the center of tonight’s political earthquake believes.

Brat doesn’t just have a PhD in economics; he also has a Master of Divinity in Theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. His academic interests are similarly eclectic; they range from the business climate in Virginia to test scores in Eastern Europe to Ayn Rand.

Matt Brooks is Executive Director of the Republican Jewish Committee. Eric Cantor is the only Jewish Republican member of Congress.

In other primary news tonight...

A few years ago, who would’ve predicted that Lindsey Graham — a guy who voted for immigration reform and worked on a climate-change bill — would survive a Tea Party challenge in 2014 but not Eric Cantor?

Just-deposed House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and his successful challenger David Brat spent plenty of this spring’s primary campaign arguing over immigration. Brat, most recently, said that Cantor was responsible for thousands of child migrants coming from Central America — because he briefly discussed introducing a bill called the “KIDS Act” last year, which would have given legal status to some young unauthorized immigrants. (No bill was ever introduced.) But Cantor, meanwhile, sent out two mailers portraying himself as the man protecting America from the “Obama-Reid amnesty.”

The first campaign mailer, via Politico:

Todd Starnes, a popular conservative talk radio host on Fox, is sure pleased with Cantor’s defeat:

It’s a reminder that somewhat outside the eye of the elite political conversation, conservative talk radio is an influential force that’s always been relentlessly opposed to comprehensive immigration reform even when George W. Bush and other major party leaders were pushing it.

Looks like we’ve hit the point in the evening when campaign strategists who didn’t predict this are now giving anonymous quotes about why it was inevitable.

Eric Cantor’s shocking defeat at the hands of David Brat is that rarest of things in American politics: a genuine earthquake. And like with real earthquakes, the damage will be much greater because so few were prepared. A few provisional thoughts:

Further reading: For more on Eric Cantor’s shocking loss, see the full storystream here.

In the wake of Eric Cantor’s primary defeat, there are likely to be lots of pundits saying that Cantor lost “because of immigration reform.” Many of those will say that Cantor’s loss “kills any chance for immigration reform this Congress.”

In the weird, meta, media-fishbowl world of Washington, where (if you’re important enough) simply declaring something dead makes it less likely to happen, that might make sense. But taking a step back and looking at the reality of the situation, it’s hard to see what Cantor’s loss changes.

Virginia has a Democratic Party governor, two Democratic Senators, and voted for Barack Obama twice. So it might surprise you to learn that eight of its eleven House seats are in Republican hands. That’s the virtue of an artful gerrymander:

Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House Majority Leader who just suffered a surprise primary defeat, has butted heads with President Barack Obama on a wide variety of issues. But there’s at least one issue where Cantor was a reliable Obama ally: NSA surveillance.

In August, Tea Party Republican Justin Amash (R-MI), along with Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), offered an amendment to a defense funding bill that would have shut down the NSA’s controversial phone-records program. The amendment won the support of 94 Republicans and 111 Democrats, coming just a few votes short of passage. Cantor, like Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) voted no.

Via Caitlin Emma of Politico:

See more in this storystream here.

From Emily Cahn, politics reporter at Roll Call:

Correction: A reader pointed out Cantor might be able to run as a write-in, since the Virginia law only explicitly forbids his name from appearing on the ballot.

Per Open Secrets, here’s a quick look at the financial mismatch in the VA-7 primary. Cantor out-raised Brat by a factor of 25:1.

Via Emily Cahn at Roll Call:

And given that the Majority Leader position was first created in 1899, that means this has never happened before.

In September 2010, as House Republicans seemed headed toward midterm triumph, Cantor and of his colleagues — Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan — co-wrote a book called “Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leadership.” They made this trailer for the book.