Report: Talk Radio May Have Doomed Cantor

Laura Ingram

If Eric Cantor needed evidence that his political career was in real trouble, all he had to do was look outside his living room window one night last week, according to Jeremy Peters at The NY Times:

At a stately country club about half a mile from his home in the affluent Richmond, Virginia, suburb of Glen Allen, so many people had come to see Radio talk host Laura Ingraham stump for Cantor's opponent in the Republican primary, David Brat, that the overflow parking nearly reached his driveway. 

Ingraham was so taken aback at the size of the crowd - inside the clubhouse, hundreds of people crammed onto staircase landings, leaning over railings - she wondered aloud what was really going on. 

"We all looked at each other, saying, 'He could totally win,'" Ingraham said in an interview. "I've had two moments in American politics in the last 15 years where I knew there was a big change afoot. One was when I left the Iowa caucuses in 2008. I walked out of there and said to a friend, 'Barack Obama is going to win.' And the other was when I left that rally last Tuesday." 

Few people did more than Ingraham to propel Brat, a 49-year-old economics professor who has never held elected office before, from obscurity to national conservative hero.

Brat may have been turned away when he asked for financial support from well-funded conservative groups, and he was largely ignored by the national and local media, which considered Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House, a shoo-in. But he was a known quantity to the loyal audiences of radio personalities like Ingraham and Mark Levin, a Reagan aide and a revered figure in the conservative movement.

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