The race to fill the leadership vacuum created by the stunning primary loss Tuesday night of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) began Wednesday morning, with several senior Republicans scrambling to build support.
With jockeying already underway, Cantor, House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) were expected to meet around midday, according to aides. McCarthy, the next in line after Boehner and Cantor, is widely expected to run for majority leader, but he will have competition.
(Live updates on the Cantor upset and its aftermath)
Cantor (Va.) returned to the U.S. Capitol just hours after losing in a primary to Dave Brat, an economist at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va. who had tea party backing. The loss left the GOP in chaos and the House GOP without its heir apparent.
Sneaking into the building through a back door on the Senate side in hopes of avoiding reporters, Cantor appeared stone-faced and tense, grimacing when asked by the Washington Post whether he would step down from his leadership post or resign from Congress.
“No,” he said — as in no comment — when pressed on whether he would step down as majority leader in the coming days. He promised to “talk later” Wednesday about his plans.
Cantor, who has represented the Richmond suburbs since 2001, lost by 11 percentage points to Brat. It was an operatic fall from power, swift and deep and utterly surprising. As late as Tuesday morning, Cantor had felt so confident of victory that he spent the morning at a Starbucks on Capitol Hill, holding a fundraising meeting with lobbyists while his constituents went to the polls.
By Tuesday night, he had suffered a defeat with few parallels in American history. And by Wednesday morning, the race to fill the leadership vacuum appeared to be taking shape.
Cantor’s defeat creates enormous uncertainty in the House. Cantor, 51, had been considered the next generation’s GOP leader, who would take over for Boehner, 64,when he retired. In a caucus deeply divided between establishment Republicans and fire-breathing conservatives, these were the two who had shown some ability to keep order.
McCarthy hesitated even behind closed doors Wednesday morning to say he would run for majority leader, still stunned by the loss of his close friend, Cantor, according to aides not authorized to speak publicly about the unfolding leadership race.
McCarthy spent the morning in his spacious suite on the first floor of the Capitol, reaching out by telephone to more than 100 members, declining to go into details about his plans while hinting, with his appreciation for the encouragement, that he would run for majority leader.
But McCarthy knows that he will have competition. Friends have advised him to expect a challenge for majority leader from Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), the chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee. McCarthy and Sessions are longtime foes, both having run for whip in 2010, with McCarthy besting his older opponent. Ever since, Sessions has been eager to challenge McCarthy and is telling colleagues that an older, more conservative hand is needed near the top, aides said.
With McCarthy seeking to climb the leadership ranks, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), the chief deputy whip, announced to his inner circle Wednesday morning that he will run for whip and throw his support behind McCarthy as majority leader.
Roskam told The Washington Post that he would not comment out of respect to Cantor. He was seen heading to a meeting with his allies to discuss his path ahead.
But Roskam is expected to face competition from Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who leads the conservative Republican Study Committee and is already privately whipping votes, according to aides familiar with his plans. In his conversations with colleagues, Scalise is making the case that he would serve as “a red state voice” in leadership ranks currently lacking a hardline conservative.
Other senior members may seek to join the fight for leadership positions. Several names emerged as possible contenders Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, including Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), currently the fourth-ranking Republican; Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), the head of the House Financial Services Committee; and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a former RSC head who remains close to leadership.
Boehner appeared unfazed by the developments Tuesday night. He stuck to his usual routine by hanging out with close friends and aides at an Italian restaurant that he likes near Capitol Hill. Emerging from the restaurant with aides around 10:30 p.m., he declined to comment to reporters who asked if he had any response to Cantor’s loss.
Later, Boehner and his remaining lieutenants issued statements acknowledging the defeat. Boehner called Cantor “a good friend and a great leader.” McCarthy called him “one of my closest friends.” McMorris Rodgers said he was “a great friend and colleague.” Their words did little to quell the concerns of rank-and-file Republicans, who were left stunned, tongue-twisted and unsure of what to do or say.
Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) had been one of those junior members that Cantor raised money for on Tuesday morning. Asked about the loss Tuesday night, Bridenstine said it was “surprising” and said he considered Cantor a friend.
But then he turned pragmatic: “I’m one of those guys who challenged a Republican in a primary myself and I was outspent some say 4-to-1, some say 5-to-1. This is the way the American system works and challengers sometimes have an advantage. And if you pull the right levers, anything can happen in American politics.”
Rep. Glen “G.T.” Thompson (R-Pa.) said that the unexpected loss “changes the dynamics for leadership.” When asked who might fill the void, he said, “I’m not sure who that would be at this point.” Asked whether the loss might pose a challenge to Boehner’s leadership, he said, “I don’t believe that it does.”
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said he wondered whether the GOP was crumbling as a whole. “I don’t know where we go now as a party,” he said in an interview. “I’m very concerned that we may go all the way to the right.”
Brat, meanwhile, appeared to struggle under fresh scrutiny of his upstart campaign. During an interview on MSNBC Wednesday morning, he said that his unexpected victory came in part because of concerns in Cantor’s district about the future of immigration reform.
He said immigration “was a clear differentiator between myself and Eric Cantor” and added that Cantor “has not been present in the district.”
“I was door-knocking, I know what was on the minds of the folks,” he said.
But Brat appeared caught off guard by a barrage of policy questions. “I thought we were just going to chat today about the celebratory aspect,” he said.
Several political observers said they believed that Cantor had mismanaged his campaign, with a strategy in which he was personally too aloof and his tactics too aggressive. In Virginia, some Republicans perceived him as having grown removed from his 7th Congressional District, spending too much time on national fundraising and Washington infighting.
“Cantor’s field effort was nonexistent. You didn’t see a heavy Cantor presence at Shad Planking, one of the premier Virginia GOP events, and the movers-shakers in the group he works with, YG Virginia, did not have the staff to fully compete,” said Andrew Xifos, a Virginia Republican organizer. “Brat was always an afterthought to them, even as they spent a lot of money. Central Virginia politics was changing around them and they did not see it.”
Then, some strategists said, Cantor compounded his problems with a blitz of TV ads that attacked Brat, 49. Cantor was apparently intending to bury his underfunded challenger, but the strategy backfired.
“It gave [Brat] oxygen and it gave him sympathy. It was just a tactical mistake,” a Virginia Republican strategist said. “That’s when Brat went from being a guy that die-hard tea party people had heard about to being a guy that just ordinary conservatives driving around and listening to talk radio had heard about.”
Brat was boosted for months by conservative talk-radio hosts, including Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, who touted him as a contender to their listeners and drove small-dollar donations into Brat’s coffers.
Unhappy with what they considered a too-hesitant-to-fight GOP, they championed Brat as a fellow warrior for an ideological cause, lifting him with the GOP’s base as he hovered under the national radar.
When Election Day came, the turnout was high: About 65,000 people voted, which was up from 47,037 two years ago (when Cantor captured 79 percent of the vote).
After the race had been called, Brat spoke to cheering supporters in the atrium of a nondescript building at an office park. He told them that he had won by adhering to conservative principles.
“I love every single person that God made on the planet because they’re all children of God,” he said. He returned to a tea party tenet, talking about the need to control government spending: “It’s not a punchline, it’s called fiscal responsibility.”
His victory means that Cantor cannot get on the ballot in Virginia this fall. Brat will face Democratic nominee Jack Trammell — another professor at Randolph-Macon. Cantor’s only option would be a hard and humiliating one: to run as a write-in candidate, in the district he dominated for 13 years.
Laura Vozzella, David A. Fahrenthold, Sean Sullivan, Mike DeBonis, Rosalind S. Helderman and Jenna Portnoy contributed to this report.
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