Migrants to rural areas and exurbs, without local roots, are making federal races more national

While political analysts scramble to understand how a little-known, more conservative challenger could defeat influential and long-serving candidate Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House majority leader, in a primary last week, and why Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) is in a runoff tomorrow and trailing a similar challenger in polls, the explanation might be migration. Conservative newcomers to Mississippi and Virginia's 7th District care little about the history of a politician and instead are "bringing nationalized politics to races further down the ballot," Ashley Parker and Jonathan Martin report for The New York Times. (NYT photo by Brandon Dill: A growing subdivision in Southaven, Miss.)

"For all the talk about how partisan polarization is overwhelming Washington, there is another powerful, overlapping force at play: Voters who are not deeply rooted increasingly view politics through a generic national lens," Parker and Martin write.

That was true in Cochran and Cantor's primary losses. In DeSoto County, the third largest county in Mississippi, state Sen. Chris McDaniel beat Cochran by 36 percentage points, Parker and Martin write. Census figures show that 72 percent of the county's residents were born outside Mississippi and more than 88 percent moved into their current home since 1990. Cantor suffered a similar fate, losing in his district's two largest counties, Henrico and Chesterfield, where more than 40 percent of residents were born out of state.

"Friends-and-neighbors elections were already a thing of the past in congressional campaigns," Parker and Martin write. "But the axiom that 'all politics is local' is increasingly anachronistic when ever-larger numbers of voters have little awareness of what incumbents did for their community in years past and are becoming as informed by cable television, talk radio and the Internet as by local sources of news. In this year’s primaries, the trend is lifting hard-liners, but it has benefited more moderate candidates in general elections."

Speaking of voters new to the states, Republican strategist Karl Rove told the Times, “They don’t know who the heck Thad is. There is no 40-year history with him, knowing that this is the guy who built up the state’s modern Republican Party. The same with Eric, people who have just gotten to Richmond don’t even know what the House of Delegates is, let alone that he served there.” (Read more)