At last, some polling numbers on the 7th district race between incumbent Eric Cantor and challenger David Brat…
The Daily Caller has what it calls a “shock poll” showing Cantor struggling, leading Brat 52-40 with nine percent undecided.
For a member of House leadership not under indictment, those are truly terrible headline numbers.
And that explains why, a couple of hours later, the Cantor campaign did what it has never done before and released its internal polling numbers to the Washington Post. The headline here? Cantor is up 62-28 over Brat.
The only reason Cantor’s team releases this internal figures is because the Caller’s poll numbers spooked it. And rightly so.
But in either case, the polls point to a Cantor win. But the kind of win that shows him not only turning in weaker numbers than John Boehner did in his primary in early May, but also the kind of numbers that all but guarantee he will be challenged again in 2014.
Not to mention putting a snag in his plans to become Speaker of the House.
And let’s revisit one other thing from Mr. Boehner’s race that bears consideration in the Cantor/Brat contest…
Boehner’s challenger got a boost from $350,000 in outside spending, but the Speaker still managed to snag 69 percent of the vote. Mr. Brat does not have the same support, and even by Cantor’s internal numbers, is doing better than the Speaker’s challenger.
My sources tell that a while back, a national group polled the 7th district to see if Brat had a shot at knocking Cantor off. If he did, they would pump money into the race in support of Brat’s campaign. Their polling showed Brat had no chance of winning, and that Cantor’s early (and deeply distorted) attacks on Brat had done sufficient damage to put the race out of reach. They shared their findings with Brat, who responded by saying he was going to press hard to get Democrats involved in the primary.
Now you know why the Brat campaign itself, and a strong set of its supporters, are calling this an “open primary.” Which it is.
But that is amusing, considering both Brat and his supporters consider Cantor a liberal/progressive, an apostate who has abandoned the GOP creed and generally view the hint of any Democratic interference in Republican politics as an unforgivable sin (ranking right up there with “compromise”).
The final numbers will probably fall close to Cantor’s internals. That means he wins (and unsurprisingly Cantor got the RTD endorsement today). In the larger game of internal GOP politics, though, it also means he will have more and bigger fights ahead of him, not just in primaries at home, but also within his caucus.
