Demonstrators protesting immigration policy at the office of Representative Eric Cantor, who lost his seat in an election on Tuesday. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
The lesson that immigration advocates say they gleaned from Tuesday’s election results is, simply put, that hedging on such an intensely charged issue can be politically fatal.
Two very different primaries — one statewide in South Carolina, and one in a gerrymandered Virginia House district that includes parts of Richmond — made that clear.
In South Carolina, Senator Lindsey Graham — one of the Republican architects of the bipartisan Senate immigration bill, who openly discussed his support for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants on the campaign trail — easily fended off six primary challengers to win his party’s nomination. But in Virginia, Representative Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican, lost in a stunning primary upset to a little-known Tea Party challenger after showing some lukewarm support for several more narrow immigration compromises before frantically backpedaling from the issue.
“You’ve got to take a firm stance one way or the other,” Mr. Graham said in an interview Wednesday. “The worst thing you can do on an issue like this is to be hard to figure out. And I am not hard to figure out on immigration.”
Frank Sharry, the executive director of American’s Voice, a pro-immigration group, echoed Mr. Graham, saying that when it comes to immigration, “You are either for it 100 percent, or you’re against it.”
“Cantor was trying to carve out a middle ground, but there really isn’t one to be found, and he ended up speaking out of both sides of his mouth,” Mr. Sharry said. “In contrast, Graham carved out a strong position in favor of reform, planted a flag and lived to tell about it.”
Although immigration was not the sole factor in Mr. Cantor’s defeat, he was no doubt hobbled by his openness to at least some pro-immigration measures — such as permitting young illegal immigrants brought to the country as children to be given a pathway to legal status and allowing more work visas for high-tech workers. He was also part of the Republican leadership team that helped draft a set of immigration principles that included a lengthy path to legal status for some illegal immigrants.
Mr. Cantor’s opponent, David Brat, criticized Mr. Cantor’s “softness” toward undocumented immigrants — a message that was amplified by powerful conservative voices such as Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, both talk radio hosts. In a Quinnipiac University poll conducted in March in Virginia, a plurality of voters and a majority of Republicans in the state said they would not vote for a Senate candidate who supported a pathway to citizenship. Mr. Cantor’s district is more conservative than the state as a whole.
By the final weeks of his campaign, Mr. Cantor had begun distancing himself from his previous positions, blanketing his district with mailers noting his opposition to “amnesty” for “illegal aliens.” In Mr. Sharry’s words, “his political crime was being a hypocrite.”
Both Democrats and Republicans say that Mr. Cantor was likely hurt by seeming to flip-flop on the issue. In the eyes of the most conservative voters, they said, his support for even some immigration measures was disqualifying, but for others his backpedaling added to the perception that he was inauthentic.
“When you believe in something and try to persuade people you’re right, even if they’re not initially for you, they respect you for that, rather than if you try to have it both ways,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who helped write the Senate immigration bill. “Graham and Cantor are a classic contrast.”
Mr. Graham, meanwhile, has been talking openly about an immigration overhaul since 2006, and repeatedly talked about the nation’s broken immigration system — and his plan to fix it — during his Senate campaign. (He had also stressed other key conservative issues, especially on foreign policy and national security, and became an outspoken critic of the administration’s handling of Benghazi.)
“Immigration did not hurt me,” Mr. Graham said. “I got credit for taking this on. I was all in, and I’m going to fight to solve this problem.”
Leaders on both sides of the immigration debate are already bringing their own interpretations to Tuesday night’s results. Some see them as impending death for the immigration legislation in the Republican-controlled House, where rank-and-file members were already skittish about taking on such a divisive issue in an election year.
In an interview with Ms. Ingraham on her radio program on Wednesday, Mr. Brat called an immigration overhaul dead on arrival. “This is just the first little wave,” he said.
White House officials — who are likely to come under increased pressure from advocates to act on immigration without the support of Congress — said it was premature to say how Mr. Cantor’s defeat would affect the administration’s strategy for overhauling immigration laws. For now, a senior official said, the White House would stick to its plan to press lawmakers to act on legislation in June and July, and then take stock during the August congressional recess, before deciding whether to proceed with unilateral executive actions. The potential actions range from modest efforts, like giving immigration agents more leeway to decide who can be spared from deportation, to far broader changes, like protecting large numbers of illegal immigrants from deportation, including the parents of children who are American citizens.
Despite the dim prospects for immigration in the House, advocates pressed on with protests on Capitol Hill on Wednesday demanding legislation to stop deportations. The police arrested 17 chanting protesters, including four children and Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers, who held a sit-in outside the offices of House Speaker John A. Boehner.