2014 Virginia primary: How David Brat won - POLITICO.com: Cantor’s aides take pride in running a strong race against any candidate — Democrat or Republican. But the $2 million Cantor spent to brand Brat as a liberal professor may have had the reverse effect, people close to him and Brat say. It showed voters there was an alternative to Cantor -and that was exactly what many voters wanted.
(Also on POLITICO: For Jewish Republicans: Oy veh)
“The negative ads calling me a liberal professor at first they started off with kind of comic strips,” Brat said in an interview here late Tuesday night. “And everyone kind of liked them. Me and my boy watched them the first night and kind of died laughing. We thought they were funny.”
“They gave me $1 million in name ID and I think that got us going, I think. I’m not a political expert on that, but I think they kind of saw that was happening and they made those a little darker, and they were black and green and looked like a Star Wars thing by the time they got done with it – it made me look like a pretty serious guy.”