Posted on June 19, 2014

Poll: Tea Party, Anti-Amnesty Voters Ousted Eric Cantor

Tony Lee, Breitbart, June 18, 2014

A post-election survey found that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) support for amnesty legislation influenced a majority of voters who ousted him last week in Virginia’s seventh congressional district primary that blindsided the mainstream media and rocked establishment Washington.

A Silver Bullet survey found that 52% of primary voters said that Cantor’s position on immigration was either the “main reason” they voted for his opponent David Brat or had a “significant part” in influencing their vote.

In addition, Tea Party voters, who made up 55% of the electorate, powered Dave Brat to the shocking upset. The Silver Bullet survey found that Brat won 71% of Tea Party voters while losing among “those who oppose the Tea Party or who have no opinion about it.”

Many Tea Party and conservative voters, who were also upset with George W. Bush’s expansion of the federal government, do not think of themselves as belonging to a party, and 24% of the electorate said they were “unaffiliated.” Brat got 71% of those voters, while Cantor received 29%. Republicans made up 70% of the electorate, and Cantor received 51% of those voters to Brat’s 49%.

Critics like Jeb Bush adviser Mike Murphy have falsely asserted that immigration did not play a significant role in Cantor’s loss and have even suggested that Democrats may have powered Brat to the victory. The survey proved Murphy wrong. It found that since “Democrats made up just 3% of the electorate . . . it is not possible that they were a driving factor in the results.”

Furthermore, “26% of voters changed from Cantor to Brat in the final two weeks,” which was when Brat, with the help of conservative talk radio hosts Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, hammered Cantor for supporting amnesty.

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According to the poll, 22% of Brat voters said immigration/amnesty was the primary reason they voted for him. Other issues that influenced Brat’s voters included: leadership (20%), government spending (23%), and privacy and government surveillance (2%). Thirty-three percent cited “other.”

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Laura Ingraham, who hammered Cantor over the amnesty issue, campaigned for Brat during the final week of the campaign at a mid-week event which nearly 700 people attended. Breitbart News reporter Michael Patrick Leahy was there, and he reported that Ingraham told attendees that President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wanted Cantor to win the primary so they could  partner with him on amnesty legislation after the primary.

“I have this crazy idea, as does Dave Brat, that coming to our country, respecting our way of life, our laws, is a condition precedent to your becoming an American citizen,” Ingraham said at the event. Cantor made things worse when he told a local television station on the Friday before the election that he would be willing to work with Obama to give citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, which confirmed the attacks against him from Brat and his allies.

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