Two Warning Signs Presaged Cantor’s Fall

Jeff Schapiro says there were menacing signs for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) but “few paid them any mind.”

“In March — in Cantor’s home county of Henrico — tea partyers and libertarians, disdainful of the congressman’s more traditional brand of Republicanism, blocked his forces from using a practice known as ‘slating’ to take control of the county delegation to the party’s 7th District convention.”

“Then, in May, at the district convention a short distance from the outer Richmond subdivision where Cantor lives, the same coalition of grass-roots insurrectionists voted out Cantor’s handpicked district chairman, Linwood Cobb, and replaced him with Fred Gruber, a tea party activist from rural Louisa County.”