Here's a profile -- edited to reflect Tuesday's primary -- that ABC News' John Parkinson did of Brat in May:
Meet Dave Brat, an economics and ethics professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, who launched a long-shot -- and ultimately successful -- bid to oust House Majority Leader Eric Cantor from his seat representing Virginia’s 7th Congressional District.
Eric Cantor Loses Primary in Shocking Upset
“Years ago he had a good conservative track record, but now he’s veered off,” Brat told ABC News during an interview on Capitol Hill in May. “If you go to Heritage and look at their score, I think he’s at about a 53 right now. I mean, that’s an F-minus.”
Heritage Action’s scorecard tracks Republican votes, co-sponsorships and other legislative activity to gauge how conservative members of Congress are performing. Cantor actually receives a 52 percent, which ranks seventh among eight Virginia House Republicans. The quirky challenger always knew he had a tough road to victory in the primary.
“Most of these [primary] races don’t kick in until about 30 days prior,” he said. “Now everyone’s looking, what’s the race? It’s an open primary and it’s just Eric and I on the ticket.”
Brat, 49, wasn't the first primary challenger Cantor has faced. The Richmond Republican smoked primary challenger Floyd Bayne in 2012 by nearly 60 percentage points before cruising to a 17-point victory in the general election.
But with low primary turnout (just 47,000 voters turned out in the primary two years ago) and anti-incumbency fervor at an all-time high, Cantor’s team said back in May they weren't overlooking Brat, although at the time they said they didn't "see him getting a great deal of traction.”
“We’re on the ground, running the campaign,” Cantor campaign spokesman and senior strategist Ray Allen said in a phone interview. “We take every figure seriously and do our own due diligence. It is what it is.”
“The race was once viewed as a long-shot, [but] it’s tightening now,” Brat said. “We’re well over double, triple what we had on the books just a month ago and so now we’re getting the national attention I always hoped.”
Brat complained that Cantor, 50, has a “crony-capitalist mentality” to take care of the corporate sector ahead of the interests of small businesses.
“On the conservative scorecard, on the free market votes, he’s doing everything wrong,” Brat said. “He’s not following what folks in his district want him to do and it’s hurting the country.”
Brat calls himself as a “free market guy,” and says he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He also pledged never to increase taxes and to stick to a five-year promise not to vote to increase the debt limit.
“This isn’t a personal race. I’m not running against Eric,” he stressed in the May interview. “I’m just running on the founding principles that Adam Smith and free markets – they made us the greatest nation on the Earth. All right? It’s no mystery. Our rights, tradition, along with free markets and the Judeo-Christian tradition all together made us the greatest nation on the face of the Earth. I think we’re veering off course a little bit there and I want to get us back on that course that brought us to greatness.”
Brat would not commit his vote for speaker to House Speaker John Boehner, but offered his support to any contender who’s “more free market and more fiscally responsible.”
“I’d have to take a good look at what they’re doing but I support people who follow the Republican creed, and so it doesn’t look like the leadership is doing a good job on that right now,” Brat said. “They’re not free market at all, right? They do not take free market seriously and they’re off on fiscal responsibility.”
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"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton
More Merton Quotes
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