WASHINGTON — The pollster for defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor claims Democrats who pulled the lever for Cantor’s Tea Party opponent helped throw off his survey predicting victory and swayed the race.
A late May poll by McLaughlin & Associates showed Cantor with a fat 34-point lead over little-known David Brat. Brat crushed Cantor in the GOP primary Tuesday, 56 to 44 percent.
Voters in Virginia don’t register by party and can vote in either party’s primary.
In comments to the National Journal the day after Cantor’s defeat, McLaughlin blamed a pitch by former Democratic Congressman and “Dukes of Hazzard” actor Ben “Cooter” Jones for Democrats and Independents to back Brat and upend Cantor.
“Over the weekend, Democrats like Ben Jones and liberal media were driving their Democratic voters on the Internet into the open primary. Eric got hit from right and left. In our polls two weeks out, Eric was stronger with Republicans, at 70 percent of the vote, but running under 50 percent among non-Republicans.”
“Untold story,” McLaughlin continued, “is who were the new primary voters? They were probably not Republicans.”
Results do show a spike in the vote compared with 2012, a presidential-election year.
But a county-by-county analysis by The Washington Post reveals that the counties with the biggest vote increase were Republican counties that President Obama didn’t carry — indicating it wasn’t Democrats who made the difference.