[Flash Walken]

WASHINGTON — In one of the most stunning primary election upsets in congressional history, the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, was soundly defeated on Tuesday by a Tea Party-backed economics professor who had hammered him for being insufficiently conservative.

Mr. Cantor’s defeat delivered a major jolt to the Republican Party — he had widely been considered the top candidate to succeed Speaker John A. Boehner one day — and it has the potential both to change the debate in Washington on immigration and to reshape the midterm elections, which had been favoring his party.

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Mr. Cantor’s defeat — the most unexpected of a congressional leader in recent memory — will reverberate in the capital and could have major implications for an immigration overhaul.

Mr. Cantor, who is in his seventh term, had sought to rebut Mr. Brat’s charges on immigration, using some of his $5.4 million to send fliers and air television ads in which he claimed to oppose an “amnesty” policy. But with significant help from conservative talk radio figures such as Laura Ingraham, Mr. Brat was able to galvanize opposition to Mr. Cantor in one of Virginia’s most conservative congressional districts.

Mr. Cantor’s loss recalled the defeat of former Speaker Thomas S. Foley, a Democrat who lost to a little-known Republican, George Nethercutt, in the 1994 general elections that delivered control of Congress to the Republicans. It is extremely rare for a member of the congressional leadership to lose a primary.

Mr. Cantor had won primary elections in his district around Richmond, Va. — which stretches more than 100 miles from the Tidewater region nearly to the Washington suburbs — with as much as 79 percent of the vote, and he won his race for a sixth term with 58 percent. He was not seen as vulnerable in this cycle.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/us...?smid=re-share