My news feed today gave me an article about how Eric Cantor lost his primary bid to Tea Party upstart Dave Brat.
This is not the first time this has happened. I first saw it back in 2010, when Mike Lee defeated Senator Bob Bennett in the Republican Utah primary. Elected leaders, both Republican and Democrat, have been undermined not in actual elections, but in the primary process.
Putting all politics aside, this is the perfect example of how knowing your environment and the rules can make you a very dangerous opponent. There have always been calls for an "outsider" to be elected to Congress, but unless you had previous fame (e.g. Arnold Schwarzenegger), you had almost zero chance. The primary process has its own rules that makes it fairly hard for outsiders to influence. Thus, most complaints and calls for action were simply ignored by the folks on the inside.
The Tea Party has completely stood the primary system on its head. Rather than simply complain about how broken the process is, they learned all the rules and then used them to promote their own candidates. Elected officials that could previously blow off their complaints might find themselves without a job, or at least a very difficult reelection bid. Using the rules to promote unknown candidates isn't unique or even new. Abraham Lincoln beat out popular candidates like William Seward in the Republican primaries by manipulating the system, going so far as to deliberately change seating arrangements at the National Convention in Chicago to purposely divide his opponents supporters from each other.
