Weekly in Cantor's district didn't miss threat to him

National news media missed the impending, historic defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a Republican primary last week, but Jim McConnell didn't. A reporter for the weekly Chesterfield Observer in Midlothian, Va., McConnell "wrote several articles in the spring suggesting Mr. Cantor was in for a fight," reports New York Times media writer David Carr. The first story ran April 23; the last one, on June 4, said challenger David Brat was "gathering steam" and quoted an establishment GOP state senator as acknowledging that Brat could win. (Click image for larger version)

“You could tell wherever you went that Cantor was incredibly unpopular, that people saw him as arrogant,” McConnell told Carr. “Dave Brat gave me his cell-phone number when I first met with him, and I pretty much had him to myself. . . . The fact that no one saw this coming is a reflection of the fact that there aren’t that many boots on the ground. Newspapers have been gutted and the people that are left are great, but stretched incredibly thin.”

McConnell, who was laid off from a sports-writing job at The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg in 2009 and was out of work for a year and a half, took the national attention humbly. “I am not Nostradamus — I didn’t see him winning, but I knew it would be closer than anybody thought,” he told Carr. “Any credible journalist would have seen it — all I did was talk to the challenger, listen to what people were saying and get a sense of what was happening on the ground in this campaign.”

Carr also links to a May 24 story by Richmond Times-Dispatch political writer Jeff Schapiro, which reported that "the Republican revolt against Cantor" was most visible in "a vast swath of rural central Virginia" and that Cantor's ads attacking Brat might be backfiring. (Read more)