… Like Tea Party challengers across the country, Brat sought to make immigration reform a defining issue in the campaign, accusing Cantor of supporting “amnesty” for immigrants in the country illegally, even though Cantor opposed the comprehensive, bipartisan Senate bill and only supported (but did not bring to the floor) a more limited Republican version of the DREAM Act, which allowed children brought to the U.S. illegally to be eligible for in-state college-tuition rates. Despite its prominence in the debate, there is good evidence that immigration reform was not the decisive factor in the election. …
While support for a path to citizenship may not be a third rail for Republican candidates, it’s a good proxy for the cultural war inside the GOP that began with the rise of the Tea Party. It’s a war over the politics of nostalgia, and it’s demonstrated by the yawning gap between Tea Party Republicans, who constitute about one-quarter of the whole, and establishment Republicans on a range of questions about cultural and demographic changes in America. The politics of nostalgia is especially intense among Tea Party Republicans, and far more tempered among establishment Republicans. CONT.
Robert P. Jones (Public Religion Research Institute), The Atlantic