Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Two weeks after the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, Republican in Virginia, went down to a stunning primary defeat, the establishment struck back Tuesday night.
From Mississippi to New York to Colorado, there were plenty of close races for incumbents, but they all survived.
The NewsHour’s political editor, Domenico Montanaro, is back with us to decipher what happened.
So, Domenico, what did happen? This was supposed to be comeback night for the Tea Party, Mississippi.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, Political Editor: Maybe, right?
I mean, we were wondering whether or not the Eric Cantor race would be an aberration or whether or not it would be the start of some kind of anti-incumbent trend. And what it certainly looked like last night is that it really was just an aberration for Cantor, because there were some other issues at play where he ignored his district.
There were plenty, like we said in the intro, of very close races, Mississippi being one of them, but Thad Cochran, the incumbent senator there, longtime senator, eked out a win by just less than 2 percentage points over his Tea Party opponent. And he did it in a very unique way.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, talk about that, because there’s a lot of discussion — and you have been looking into this today — about what happened in some of these heavily Democratic parts of the state.
DOMENICO MONTANARO: Well, if you told me three weeks ago that a Republican would wind up winning a Republican primary by appealing to Democrats and black voters, I would have said he’s done.
And I think that’s why a lot of the political community was fairly skeptical that Thad Cochran and his team, with the Haley Barbour machine really in Mississippi, being able to pull that off. And that’s exactly what they wound up doing.
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