It is really interesting watching the political dynamics this season. The Political Industrial Complex (Politicians and their staff, Political Consultants, Political News Media, Lobbyists, etc) has just been completely shocked today as the GOP House Majority Leader – Eric Cantor – lost his primary to an unknown Libertarian backed by Tea Party groups.

It wasn’t enough that Eric Cantor spent $1 million in the weeks leading up to the election, when his primary opponent hardly had $100,000 in his campaign coffers.

It didn’t matter that the House majority leader, 51, branded Dave Brat a liberal hack, and himself as the guardian of the Republican creed. On Tuesday night, Cantor, who was swept into the majority leader’s suite in a tea party wave, was swept out by the same movement.

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It’s one of the most stunning losses in modern House politics, and completely upends the GOP hierarchy in both Virginia and Washington. Cantor enjoyed a meteoric rise that took him from chief deputy whip, to minority whip to majority leader in the span of 13 years.

Cantor was seen by many as the next speaker of the House, biding his time until Ohio Rep. John Boehner wanted to retire.

But now, Cantor has just six months left in Congress. He is the second incumbent to lose this primary season: 91-year-old Texas Rep. Ralph Hall was the first.

Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are no doubt smiling this morning. And Thad Cochran – the likely next old-guard GOP Pol to lose – should be seeing the writing on the wall for his primary.

The conventional wisdom says Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel has the advantage in the upcoming June 24 Senate runoff — and a new robopoll of likely GOP runoff voters from the group Strategic National feeds that CW by finding the GOP challenger with a 6-point lead. McDaniel takes 52 percent in the poll, with GOP incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran at 46 percent.

So why is this happening? Why all of sudden a sea change in attitude?

I don’t think the attitude has changed that much – voters are fed up with DC and its incompetence and reckless spending. I think the intensity has ramped up. The GOP has never really paid serious attention to the “small government” libertarians who are simply normal (and flawed) Americans demanding government get reigned in and stop playing to the power and money in this country. Big Business and Big Government are in the cross hairs of Main Street. And in case the elites missed the math – the 5% running this country into the ground are seriously outnumbered by the rest of us who keep it working. Despite nonsensical and silly government interventions and edicts.

What is firing up the Tea Party voters to create an even bigger anti-incumbent wave than that seen in 2010? It is our lame duck President!

Obama has apparently lost his patience with the rules and processes of government. His last major push – Obamacare – was run through on an insane partisan vote. And when fixes were proposed he claimed it was the law of the land, only to run amok making changes when his signature legislation’s implementation showed up the faults and errors found in government run political agendas. Obamacare has been changed in 100’s of risky and panic-driven ways to protect it from bad press. Which means it is being chewed alive with emergency bandaid fixes instead. It is a terminal mess, costing everyone on many fronts.

Update: Right on cue I read this assessment of Obamacare today:

Yet since premium growth has averaged at least 5% over the past five years, it is unlikely the law’s federal subsidies will increase enough to make up the difference in out-of-pocket premium costs. As this happens, lower- and even middle-income consumers will be forced out of the private insurance market. As my colleague at the Medical Industry Leadership Institute, Michael Ramlet, and I show in a paper published last month, the law’s structural problems will take years to fully manifest.

The average premium for an individual exchange health plan (Silver) will increase by $1,375 by 2019 while the average family premium for the same plan will increase by $4,198—outpacing the average increases from 2008 to 2013. Consumers who saw spikes in their health premiums last year will experience the same trauma this year. But the steepest price increases will not occur.

And this is the p0litical climate the Democrats and Establishment GOP will be facing the rest of THIS DECADE! – end update

But that is just the start. Now we have completely crazy EPAs edicts built on propaganda trying to claim to be ‘science’:

A U.S. Chamber of Commerce study calculates that the new regulations will cost our economy another $51 billion annually, result in 224,000 more lost jobs every year, and cost every American household $3,400 per year in higher prices for energy, food and other necessities. Poor, middle class and minority families – and those already dependent on unemployment and welfare – will be impacted worst. Those in a dozen states that depend on coal to generate 30-95% of their electricity will be hit especially hard.
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How many people will die in order to reduce world temperatures by possibly, maybe, something a lot less than 0.05 F?

This is good government? All that pain and suffering for a temperature change NO HUMAN on the planet could even detect?

Obama’s administration is pushing this through against numerous rules and regulations on how to vet the ‘science’ behind such stupendous stupidity. He is tired of waiting.

Recently ‘His Petulantcy” decided now was the time to change the face of America forever. Realizing he was going to lose Congress and become null and void this election cycle, President Obama has opened our borders and invited in a mass of humanity that basically just want free stuff:

Children are walking hundreds of miles across a hostile environment with little more than the clothes on their backs, accompanied by neither a parent nor other responsible adult. The numbers of these children making the treacherous journey are much higher than the Obama administration has acknowledged, according to reporting by our Stephen Dinan. The deputy Border Patrol chief, Ronald Vitiello, said in an internal memo on May 30 that border agents caught 40,000 unaccompanied children last year. They expect to apprehend 90,000 children this year, and 142,000 in 2015.

Americans are a kind and generous people, and photographs of a sea of small, frightened and hungry faces in U.S. shelters along the southern border are enough to break a million hearts. President Obama, whatever he intended, is largely responsible. Lured by lax immigration enforcement and the promise of citizenship as “dreamers,” the Obama children’s hour is changing the mission at the border from ensuring security to providing emergency assistance. Last week, the president declared the border an “urgent humanitarian situation.” He assigned the handling of the influx of children to Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which customarily provides relief following natural disasters. This is a disaster, sure enough, but it’s a man-made disaster.

Obama has basically lost his patience with the checks and balances of government, and seems to also to have lost his mind. He is going to push the envelope has much as he can by executive edict. In many directions. He will force the liberal fantasy on America come hell or high water.

But this will in turn force the liberal fantasies to deal with reality. Something they just are not going to be able to survive. Just like Obama showed with Obamacare, government cures are almost always worse than the problem they were intended to fix. Most problems are best fixed at the individual or community level. But in the minds of the Political Industrial Complex, only Big Government and Big Business are able to do good, the rest of us are just too damn ignorant to do for ourselves. We need to be fixed (and controlled and billed for the service).

And it is this arrogance from DC that felled Cantor:

Brat, who admits that he has supported several Cantor candidacies over the years, says he mounted his improbable primary campaign because the House GOP’s No. 2 leader has lost touch with his constituents, “veering from the Republican creed.”

“Years ago he had a good conservative track record, but now he’s veered off,” Brat told ABC News during an interview on Capitol Hill in May. “If you go to Heritage and look at their score, I think he’s at about a 53 right now. I mean, that’s an F-minus.”

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Brat complained that Cantor, 50, has a “crony-capitalist mentality” to take care of the corporate sector ahead of the interests of small businesses.

“On the conservative scorecard, on the free market votes, he’s doing everything wrong,” Brat said. “He’s not following what folks in his district want him to do and it’s hurting the country.”

Brat calls himself as a “free market guy,” and says he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He also pledged never to increase taxes and to stick to a five-year promise not to vote to increase the debt limit.

This kind of political agenda scares the devil out of DC’s Political Industrial Complex. They know it means leaner times for them, less power and prestige. And that is why they try to undermine Tea Party backed candidates. It is why the GOP talks a lot, but in the end caves on shrinking government. And that is why there will be massive losses to the Democrats (the party of big government) and surprise losses to the GOP (because they cave too much).

To me this is just a sign of how big the 2014 voter insurgency wave is going to be. Does anyone really think Democrats are going to be safe this year when this is what Red States and Red Districts do to the GOP? The polls going into this race had Cantor way up, but as Ed Morrissey notes – only one poll really counts:

The axiom is so often used to explain away accurate but embarrassing poll results that it sounds too cliché to use it in most cases, but it’s true — the only poll that matters is the one on Election Day. Eric Cantor proved that last night, much to his chagrin, after his campaign bragged last week about an internal poll showing him up 34 points against his primary challenger, Dave Brat. Despite being outspent 25:1 in the primary — that’s not a typo, but twenty-five to one — Brat prevailed by beating Cantor by eleven points in an unusually high turnout.

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Also, it should be noted that turnout in this primary was actually higher than those earlier primaries that nominated Cantor (almost 20,000 more than in 2012) and were supposedly more representative — and that Cantor got fewer votes this time than in his last primary. In fact, Cantor’s pollster relied on those dynamics to explain how he got the race wrong by about 45 points in the gap:

Obama has decided it is time for Government to run amok and act outside the rules. And it is his actions that will create the backlash that takes out the entrenched power in DC. Because now we see how bad it can get when the wrong people get hold of power they should never have had (or need to have) in the first place. Democrats should be shaking in their boots, because they are going to take the brunt of this come November.

Update: This event needs some context  to explain why I think this is a harbinger:

The establishment has a difficult time analyzing and adapting to such ground shifting events. And make no mistake: Eric Cantor’s defeat was earth shattering.  He becomes the first Majority leader ever to lose a primary race.  EVER.  And he is the highest ranking party member to lose a primary race since 1899.

Yeah, it is that big of a deal

Update: I think the message is finally starting to sink in:

Americans see a grim future for themselves, their children and their country.  They believe their political leaders are selfish, greedy and short-sighted – unable and/or unwilling to shield most people from wrenching economic and social change. For many, the Republican Party is becoming too extreme, while the Democratic Party – specifically President Obama – raised and dashed their hopes for true reform.

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An American Party – what does that mean? For months, I’ve heard that phrase or similar anti-establishment sentiment from voters in Michigan, Arkansas, South Carolina and elsewhere – whites and non-whites; voters who are poor and rich and from the shrinking middle-class; Democrats, Republicans and independents. “We need American leaders, not Republican and Democratic leaders,” a construction workers in Little Rock, Ark., told me last month. Down the street from Penn’s Table, barber Stefanos Bouikidis held scissors in his right hand while throwing both hands in the air. “How are things going to change with corporate America running everything?”

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But what may be in the air is a peaceful populist revolt – a bottom-up, tech-fueled assault on 20^th century political institutions. In a memo to his fellow Democrats, former Clinton White House political director Doug Sosnik writes persuasively about “an increasing populist push” across the political spectrum

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Which side of the barricade are you on? Populists from the right and the left – from the tea party and libertarian-leaning Rand Paul to economic populist Elizabeth Warren – are positioning themselves among the insurgents.

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Let this be the lesson taken from Cantor’s loss. He is not the only political leader to lose touch with voters. In fact, according to every indication, the entire political class has lost touch. There is ample polling to suggest that a majority of Americans voters don’t feel rooted in – or represented by – either the Republican or Democratic parties. Change or lose power, folks.

Ya think? Keep screwing up, wasting money and hurting our chance for a decent life – and expect reelection???

Tags: Cantor, Congress, GOP, Illegal Immigration, Obama, Tea Party