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

The result delivered a major jolt to the Republican Party — Mr. Cantor had widely been considered the top candidate to succeed Speaker John A. Boehner — and it has the potential to change both the debate in Washington on immigration and, possibly, the midterm elections.

It wasn’t enough that Eric Cantor spent $1 million in the weeks leading up to the election, when his primary opponent hardly had $100,000 in his campaign coffers.
It didn’t matter that the House majority leader, 51, branded Dave Brat a liberal hack, and himself as the guardian of the Republican creed. On Tuesday night, Cantor, who was swept into the majority leader’s suite in a tea party wave, was swept out by the same movement.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his GOP Virginia primary race Tuesday night in a stunning upset to Tea Party-backed challenger Dave Brat.

Brat, an economics professor and political novice, latched onto the hot-button issue of immigration. And he accused Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the GOP-led House, of supporting immigration legislation that would give “amnesty” to millions of people living illegally in the United States.