538 and Krugman Eric Cantor upset what happened. [View all]

[Ichingcarpenter]

Last edited Wed Jun 11, 2014, 10:30 AM - Edit history (1)

Krugman's take"

Wow — Eric Cantor lost his primary, by a large margin. Amazing.

Obviously I know nothing about his district, or what exactly happened. Fivethirtyeight does have something interesting, pointing out that Tea Party upsets seem correlated with the second dimension of DW-nominate, the Poole-Rosenthal system that maps roll call votes into an implied position space. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I might come back to this, but basically I’m telling you that I remain a serious nerd.

What I think I might add to this discussion is a note on incentives: Cantor’s loss is part of a process that could well unravel movement conservatism as we know it.

Movement conservatism — as distinct from just plain conservatism, which has always been a part of the landscape and always will be — is a distinct feature of modern American politics. It dates, more or less, back to the 1970s, when conservatives, with lots of money from the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife, set about building an institutional infrastructure of think tanks, pressure groups, captive media, etc.. At first this infrastructure mainly provided backing to right-thinking (in both senses) politicians. But eventually it provided a career path for up and coming conservatives.

In particular, being a movement conservative in good standing meant considerable career safety: even if you or the politician you worked for lost an election, there were jobs to be had at think tanks (e.g. Rick Santorum heading up the “America’s enemies” program at a Scaife-backed think tank), media gigs (two Bush speechwriters writing columns for the Washington Post, not to mention the gaggle at the WSJ and Fox News), and so on.

In other words, being a hard line conservative, which to be fair involved some career risks back in the 60s and into the 70s, became a safe choice; you could count on powerful backing, and if not favored by fortune, you could fall back on wingnut welfare............

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/fall-of-an-apparatchik/?smid=re-share


My addition to the story
Anyway one thing we do know is that

Republican internal polls are really bad as this election showed and
Romney's internal polls showed.










538's take

here are a few quick thoughts.

First, this race had a heavy insider vs. outsider dynamic, and the tea party is definitely not dead. As my colleague Nate Silver pointed out previously, it was probably too early to call for the tea party’s demise. Cantor’s loss puts an exclamation point on that.

Yes, the difference between being part of the establishment and being a tea party member can be overplayed. In this case, however, it applies. Brat had the backing of local tea party groups, and you can’t get more establishment than being the House majority leader.

Cantor, in contrast to past victims of GOP primary challenges, such as Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska or former Indiana senator Dick Lugar, has little history of bucking his party. As you might expect of a Republican in a leadership position, he’s voted with his party 95 percent of the time. Because Cantor’s party is quite conservative, his votes have been quite conservative.

But his position of authority also saddles him with any grievances that voters might have against the GOP leadership.

We can look at the statistical system DW-Nominate scores to confirm this. DW-Nominate ranks members of Congress on two dimensions based on their roll call votes. The first dimension is essentially a liberal-to-conservative measure. Cantor is more conservative than any of the Republicans thought to be in trouble in 2014, according to DW-Nominate. (He has about as conservative a voting record as Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, so he’s no moderate.)

The second dimension of DW-Nominate is less commonly discussed. It describes differences among members of Congress that can’t easily be placed on a left-right scale — for instance, voting on civil rights issues during the mid-20th century. (Many northern Republicans voted in favor of civil rights legislation, while many New Deal Democrats from the South voted against it.) More recently, the second dimension has come to represent something like an insider vs. outsider (or establishment vs. tea party) spectrum.

I don’t want to claim that Cantor’s defeat was all that predictable — it wasn’t but..............


http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-eric-cantor-upset-what-happened/