Cantor vows to 'champion conservative cause' despite election loss to David Brat

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/15/cantor-conservative-cause-election-loss-immigration

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Eric Cantor, the Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives sensationally beaten by a Tea Party-backed primary challenger, on Sunday took to the talk shows to say he still wants to be “a champion of the conservative cause”.

Cantor was beaten, 56% to 44%, in Virginia's seventh congressional district by David Brat, a college economics professor. He is the first House majority leader ever to lose a primary contest.

On ABC's This Week, Cantor said: “I want to take what I've been doing here … and be able to really look towards the future so I can really continue to promote and be a champion for the conservative cause.”

He added that he still wanted “to play a role in the public debate”.

Asked on CNN's State of the Union if that could involve running for governor of Virginia in 2017 (to replace Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat and Clinton ally who narrowly beat a Tea Party-aligned Republican in last year's gubernatorial election), Cantor said: “I'm not ready to close out any options right now.”

He added: “To me, the problems that people are facing in this country are a lot greater than any kind of setback, political setback, personal setback that I have got. So I really am very focused on continuing on the mission that I have tried to be about here in Washington.

“It's those reform conservative solutions that actually can be applied to people's problems in the working middle class of this country, the poor, and for everyone.”

Cantor, who has been majority leader in the House since 2011, will step down on 31 July and leave Congress at the end of the year. This week saw intense jockeying in the race to succeed him, the establishment candidate and favourite, chief whip Kevin McCarthy, facing challengers including the Tea Party-aligned Idaho representative Raul Labrador.

Asked about the conflict within the Republican party over issues such as immigration reform that many observers saw as contributors to his defeat, Cantor did not back down from his supposedly soft stance.

He said: “I have always said that I was for the kids who due to no fault of their own find themselves here and know no other place as home."

Other Republicans, however, have not hesitated to weigh in. On Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CNN: "I don't think Eric got beat because of his stand on immigration. I think he got beat because of his lack of defining himself on immigration.”

Debate has also raged around whether internal divisions, as evince by Cantor's defeat, will affect Republican hopes at the 2014 midterm elections, in which they are expected to hold the House with ease and challenge to take the Senate from the Democrats.

On NBC's Meet the Press the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who ran unsuccessfully for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination and then in 2012 won the nomination but lost the presidential election, said pundits were placing too much importance on Cantor's defeat.

"I know it's our inclination to look at races and suggest that somehow a national movement is causing what occurs," Romney said.

Reince Priebus, the chair of the Republican National Committee, cast his eye to 2016 when he told CBS's Face the Nation: "We will be united in the presidential election.”

The Oregon representative Greg Walden, a Cantor ally and chair of the Republican National Congressional Committee, sought to portray the majority leader's fall not as dispiriting evidence of GOP division, but as encouraging evidence of a rightwing, grassroots movement in rude health.

"What you have is conservatives … fired up like they were in 2010 and it's going to play out in the fall and it's not going to be good for the Democrats,” he told Fox News Sunday.

On CNN, Cantor was asked about stories claiming large numbers of grassroots Democrats had voted for Brat in the primary, in order to ensure his downfall. He said: “I don't think [such stories are] really worthwhile … I'm looking forward.”

Citing a remark from Brat, a devout Catholic, that his primary win was “a miracle from God” which “did not just float down from heaven”, CNN host Dana Bash asked Cantor, who is Jewish, if he thought antisemitism had played any part in the campaign.

Cantor said: “Listen, I don't ever want to impute that to anybody. As you rightly say, I'm born and raised Jewish. My faith is very important to me.

“And, you know, I know that I'm going to continue to try and work with the lessons that I have learned from my early years in Hebrew school, learning about the Old Testament and much greater leaders than I with personal setbacks, but always focused on being optimistic about the future.”