Two years later, Cantor’s shocking loss reverberates all the way to Trump’s victory

The establishment Republican wing laments Cantor’s defeat at the hands of Rep. David Brat (R-Va.) as its missed opportunity to broaden the GOP’s appeal to a diversifying electorate, instead watching the GOP caucus retrench as an energized anti-immigration flank dominated the presidential primaries.

The conservative wing bemoans the lessons not learned from Cantor’s defeat by a similarly tepid new leadership team, paving the way for an angry outsider to storm his way to the nomination.

“Dave Brat’s election was a wake-up call to Washington, D.C., that they didn’t answer. And that’s why we have Donald Trump,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a renegade conservative who did not originally back Trump, said Wednesday. “The American people are sending us the same message that they sent us two years ago: We don’t care about all your inside baseball, we expect results.”…

What if Cantor had defeated Brat and become speaker? We’ll never know whether Ryan would have given into those “Draft Paul” calls from “Never Trump” conservatives.