06/12/14: The problem with candidate Cantor

This op-ed appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on the date shown.

IN THREE PREVIOUS columns, I tried to explain the challenges local candidates face in the context of elections being held on November’s crowded ballot. Truth is, the money-people-time trifecta of successful candidates doesn’t apply only at the local level — just ask Eric Cantor.

Cantor, the seven-term congressman from Virginia’s 7th district and the No. 2 Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, was soundly defeated by challenger Dave Brat. Money wasn’t an issue: Cantor spent 25 times as much as Brat, $5 million to $200,000. People weren’t the issue: Cantor had plenty of volunteers as well as paid staff.

Cantor lost because he didn’t do the time.

The talking heads will tell you that immigration was the big issue in this race and that Cantor was on the wrong side — or both sides — of it. It is true that immigration is a prominent wedge and Brat, along with the help of national talk radio, hammered it mercilessly.

But immigration didn’t cost Cantor the election.

The bloggers will tell you that it was because Cantor and his minions tried to take over the Republican Party of Virginia via a little-used process called slating to put certain supporters in power, angering the grass roots. While true, this is the kind of inside baseball of politics that the majority of voters not only don’t know about but care even less about.

Slating didn’t cost Cantor the election, either.

Cantor lost because he forgot one of the cardinal rules of a successful campaign: All politics is local.

Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill wrote a book with that title. If you haven’t read it, you might think that it means that issues are local, but that wasn’t O’Neill’s point.

Speaking of his fellow House members, O’Neill wrote: “I tell them to pay attention to their own backyard and take care of their folks. Get home often and report to their constituents. Keep them informed and you will find they will like and respect you and allow you to be a ‘national’ Congressman and vote for things that are good for the country but may not have a direct impact on your district.”

Reading the various reports on the run-up to Tuesday’s primary and the post-mortems afterward, it is clear that Cantor failed to put in the time to take care of his district.

There are a few complaints of poor constituent services, but the biggest complaint was that Cantor was never around. This was especially the case in some areas that were added to the district after the 2011 redistricting. While the underfunded Brat put in shoe leather, Cantor mailed it in, running his campaign mostly from the Nation’s Capitol, using his fundraising advantage to run ads and send mail.

Perhaps buoyed by internal polling showing him ahead by over 30 points, Cantor wasn’t even in the district on Election Day. Reports are that he was in Washington instead, holding a fundraiser.

O’Neill posited that members of the House, with their two-year terms, almost innately know that they had to put in the time in their districts. “They learn that if you don’t pay attention to the voters, you will soon find yourself right back there with them,” he wrote.

Cantor may have known this 14 years ago, when he was first elected to Congress, but he obviously forgot it in the interim. As the result, he becomes a footnote in history: the first House Majority Leader to lose his party’s primary since the position was created in 1899.