Top Jeb Bush adviser Mike Murphy, who is responsible for some of the mainstream media’s laziest and most conventional talking points about Republicans and conservatives he loathes, said liberals and conservatives who believe House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was ousted because of amnesty are “all wrong.”
Murphy, sounding ever bit like the “priests” he disdains, immediately started to claim that Cantor did not lose because of amnesty even though he, like his friends in the permanent political class that view him as a guru despite having zero presidential wins, hardly paid attention to a race that turned out to be the biggest political shocker in all of their lifetimes. Talk about conventional.
Murphy was already called out by Mickey Kaus, and he was addressing a Tweet that pointed out that conservative, establishment, and liberal panelists on last weekend’s “The McLaughlin Group” said there was “no doubt” that Cantor lost because of his embrace of amnesty legislation, as Breitbart News reported.
He is spinning Cantor’s loss as a result of anything but amnesty, which his client Jeb Bush supports in full. Murphy has even tried to assert that Democrats were responsible for Cantor’s ouster. But the mathematicians disagree with Murphy’s assertions.
Nate Cohn, a trusted numbers guru who used to write for the left-of-center New Republic before making the move to the New York Times and may have been the first person to predict a Cantor defeat as returns were trickling in on election night, wrote after the race that “Brat’s wide margin of victory sets a high bar for arguing that Democratic voters made the difference.”
“And since Mr. Brat ran so strongly in Republican territory, it’s hard to see that he needed Democratic votes to push him over the top,” he concluded.
Cohn noted that contrary to Cantor’s internal pollsters that desperately tried to save face, “in Henrico County, where 2012 primary turnout is available by precinct, the largest increases in turnout came in heavily Republican areas” and it “would be hard to argue that Democrats made up the margin of victory” because “turnout was still far, far higher in Republican precincts.” He also said that Democratic precincts “contributed very few additional votes” on election night.
Dave Wasserman, one of the editors of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, also warned after the race to not “fall for [the] theory” that Democrats “crossed over” to vote for Brat since Brat’s biggest margins were in Republican-heavy “Hanover & New Kent.”
As Breitbart News reported, Murphy has every incentive to diminish amnesty’s impact in Cantor’s loss to help Bush, a potential 2016 contender. But the facts are not on Murphy’s side. As Breitbart News noted:
If amnesty was not an issue in the race, why did Cantor send mailers falsely depicting himself as an anti-amnesty warrior? Why did an independent PAC specifically attack Cantor for his embrace of amnesty legislation in the last week of the race? Why did Brat say that a vote for Cantor would be a vote for “open borders” and his primary was the “last chance” to stop amnesty legislation?
In addition, as Breitbart News reported, contrary to Murphy’s contention, Brat, the candidate who actually ran and won the race, also said that Cantor’s support for amnesty was the “central policy issue in this race.”
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