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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCantor got waxed because the Tea Party had science.
Too funny. The Democrats helped defeat Eric Cantor not so much by voting against him in the Republican primary as by handing the Flat Earth Dave Brat-supporting insurgents some science.
In primary campaigns, the normal procedure is to ignore voters who don't have a history of voting in primaries and focus first on those who do. This is the opposite of the strategy for general elections, where those who vote in primaries are ignored because they will presumably get themselves to the polls. To beat someone like Eric Cantor in a primary, however, it would be necessary to mobilize unlikely voters. The Tea Partiers didn't know how to do that, but the campaign manager and political director of Eric Holder's 2010 opponent did.
Here's the scoop from the campaign manager, Brian Umana:
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There was a problem: the-easiest-to-use political data is owned by the two major political parties. The Democratic campaign was over, so how could we ethically share information that we thought would serve the greater good? Stevens used his statistical knowledge and near-photographic memory to work from crude, publicly available State Board of Elections data, then manipulate those data into targeted sets of voters more like those that would be available to a large campaign from one of the two parties. He created tidy data sets of voter information and preferences of a sort typically unavailable to independent or insurgent campaigns opposed by a party establishment (like Mr. Brats this year). Some techniques like Stevenss had been used by Obamas presidential campaignwhich Stevens worked on in 2008but they had not been widely adopted by Republicans, let alone tea partiers without access to the big party databases. Now Parada, who was at our post-election meetings in 2010, knew how to use them.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2014/6/14/9552/40093