Last Tuesday Laura Ingraham showed up at a Glenn Allen, Va. country club where House Majority Leader Eric Cantor belongs for a rally on behalf of his long-shot Tea Party opponent in a Republican primary.  She quickly suspected something was up since people had to park near Cantor’s house because there was no more room near the country club. Hundreds had surfaced for the rally to back David Brat, a college economics professor.  “I saw that and say that maybe Brat was a long-shot but there was something going on,” she said Wednesday morning after Brat’s head-turning defeat of Cantor.  In fact, she likened it to what she saw in 2008 when freshman Sen. Barack Obama was campaigning in the Iowa caucuses. Something was up. She left Iowa knowing Obama would win. There was something in the air.  “The national media totally missed this,” said Ingraham, a nervy and entertaining conservative, noting how little coverage the rally got, mostly via the local NBC station and a conservative website.  She subsequently talked to volunteers who were going door to door in the district and who asserted that precious few voters had much positive to say about Cantor.  That combined with their views on what she quickly discerned as the key issue: immigration.  “No matter what anybody says, it was the dominant issue. Brat volunteers said that eight of ten people they talked to were against giving benefits to illegal immigrants.”  Ingraham was no shill for the Tea Party and, in fact, had derided national Tea Party groups for not backing Brat. He had no Tea Party national endorsements, including nothing from groups such as Tea Party Patriots.  “People are fed up with b.s. politicians who think they can simply get elected with name recognition and big party titles,” she said.  As for comparing Cantor to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who easily won his contested Tuesday primary against some Tea Party opposition, she said that’s apples and oranges.  “Graham had six challengers, is a great retail politician and wasn’t trying to be something he wasn’t. He focused on fiscal issues and wasn’t running on immigration reform. But he wasn’t lying about it (his position), either.”  In the minds of critics like Ingraham, Cantor was doing just that and fudging his immigration position. A supporter of the Dream Act, he also put out glossy fliers late in the campaign touting his pro-enforcement position while ridiculing Brat as some crazy liberal.  “People saw through it,” Ingraham said.
National media were still shaking their heads Wednesday and quickly trying to explain what they totally missed in the upset victory of David Brat over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. For radio talk host Laura Ingraham, it wasn’t quite such a stunner.