In the immediate aftermath of the stunning defeat of the House majority leader, Eric I. Cantor, in Virginia’s primary elections, on Tuesday night, reaction in the news media was mostly shock. Television networks cut in for live coverage, and Twitter was flooded with awed responses.
But as the news spread, the realization set in that David A. Brat, the Tea Party-backed candidate who had unseated Representative Cantor, and his Democratic opponent, John K. Trammell, are both professors at Randolph-Macon College, in Ashland, Va.
The Washington Post put the word out around 9:30 p.m.:
The first user response may have, for some out there, hit a little close to home:
After the news organization Vox tweeted the same fact, one user tweeted back what many were probably thinking:
Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, went on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show and offered a similar sentiment:
“It is amusing that this small college—Randolph-Macon College—is going to have its own congressman. And all I can say is, I’m glad I’m not there because the faculty wars are bad enough when you don’t have two faculty members running against each other for Congress. So good luck to them.”
To see how they stack up against one another, some ventured to the most obvious metric: RateMyProfessors.com.
In fairness:
David Brat’s opponent and fellow prof, Jack Trammell, also got coveted RateMyProfessors chili pepper hotness icon! http://t.co/4K6mraS4h1
—Michael Oates Palmer (@OatesPalmer) June 11, 2014
