Low Information Voters

I was updating my laptop at my Mother’s and turned on the TV to see if there had been any more shootings this morning and encountered the ‘bubble-headed bleach blond’ on his show, Hardball. He was talking to other media types about the loss that Cantor suffered in a Republican primary that was shocking all of the ‘cool kids’, because Cantor was the House majority leader and had all kinds of money for advertizing, which is the standard by which the ‘cool kids’ decide who will win. ‘BBB’ opined that Cantor lost because the Republicans hadn’t done anything about the reducing the deficit or much of anything else while in power.

Cantor got a super-safe, overwhelmingly Republican district after the 2010 redistricting because he was a senior House Republican and would be the obvious choice for Speaker if Boehner retires. He has coasted to reelection for years, so he was out campaigning for other people, and wasn’t even in his district for the primary.

A lot of Republican voters in the district seem to have expected that some of their issues would be passed into law after the Republicans gained control of the House, but all the Republicans have done is block things from being accomplished. The government shut-down was not what they wanted, they wanted action, and didn’t get it.

The challenger, a college professor named Brat, based his campaign on the old ‘the immigrants are stealing your jobs’ theme that has been used repeatedly since the early days of of the country. It was one of the issues that spelled the end of the Whig Party and the formation of the Republican Party in the mid-nineteenth century. It is hauled out every time there is an economic down-turn to deflect blame from the speculators who are usually behind most US economic down-turns.

No one I know of actually cares about the deficit except ‘BBB’, who keeps harping on it.