Conservatives who were part of some of the recent showdowns now see potential spoils: Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, for example, has been laying the groundwork for the last several weeks to slide into an open slot should Mr. Boehner retire and, it was assumed, Mr. Cantor take his spot. 
 
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 While the most conservative members saw immediate validation in Mr. Cantor’s defeat, more conciliatory members saw deep trouble ahead. A chastened House leadership will struggle to do the most basic functions of governance — increasing the debt limit, funding the government and passing routine bills — further alienating Congress with the middle of the electorate, said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York. Mr. Cantor’s defeat will put an immigration overhaul even further out of reach, something that would hurt Republicans in the next presidential election when they will need to cut into the Democrats’ lead with immigrant and Latino voters. 
 
 “The results tonight will move the party further to the right, which will marginalize us further as a national party,” Mr. King said. 
 
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 The message from the most conservative primary voters was that even Mr. Cantor, who fashioned himself as the tip of the Tea Party’s spear, was not safe. His position in favor of a modest relaxation of immigration law became the rallying cry for the right. 
 
 And in a year when the Republican establishment was supposed to finally conquer its Tea Party wing, the upstarts wound up with perhaps the biggest victory of any primary season. 
 
 David Wasserman, a House political analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said another, more local factor has to be acknowledged: Mr. Cantor, who dreamed of becoming the first Jewish speaker of the House, was culturally out of step with a redrawn district that was more rural, more gun-oriented and more conservative. 
 
 “Part of this plays into his religion,” Mr. Wasserman said. “You can’t ignore the elephant in the room.” 
 
 Virginia – U.S. House District 7 
 
 Mr. Cantor’s demise is mildly Shakespearean. Along with Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, Mr. Cantor helped elevate Tea Party candidates in 2010 across the nation by giving them financial and political support, only to be done in by the very type of newcomer he once groomed. 
 
 Mr. Cantor can still mount a write-in campaign ahead of the November election, but he would face long odds. 
 
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 Mr. King said no one saw the defeat coming. Mr. Cantor was spending money, at least $5 million through the middle of May, lining up an array of the Republican consultants and pollsters. He was a prodigious fund-raiser and a well-liked ambassador to many of the party’s top donors. Lawmakers thought he was simply trying to run up the score to establish dominance in the district, and he had evinced no concern whatsoever, lawmakers said Tuesday night. 
 
 Mr. Wasserman predicted “a free-for-all” when House Republicans assemble after November to pick their new leaders. At the least, Mr. McCarthy, the No. 3 Republican, will seek to move up to majority leader, but he also could challenge Mr. Boehner. 
 
 More broadly, Mr. Cantor’s defeat will embolden conservatives like Representative Tom Price of Georgia, who has openly complained that the leadership positions are occupied by swing-state Republicans. 
 
 Candidates to move up could include Mr. Price, Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, or brash newcomers like Representative Tom Graves of Georgia, Mr. Wasserman said. The message is that the House must be run by even more conservative leaders. 
 
 At the least, Mr. Obama’s push for a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws now seems even more elusive. 
 
 Mr. Cantor’s opponent, Mr. Brat, had virtually no money to conduct a true campaign, but he focused on immigration. His megaphone was conservative radio show host Laura Ingraham, who criticized Mr. Cantor’s positions on immigration. 
 
 “The world just changed,” said Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama and a fierce opponent of the immigration overhaul. ||||| House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-Va.) stunning primary loss on Tuesday night has no precedent. 
 
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 A new report from the University of Minnesota’s Smart Politics political blog finds that his defeat at the hands of economics professor David Brat is the first since the creation of the office in 1899, and breaks a streak of 55 consecutive successful renomination bids by incumbent House majority leaders. 
 
 Cantor’s fall is so rare it was — up until Tuesday night — more likely for a sitting House majority leader to lose renomination by dying. Louisiana Democrat Hale Boggs died in office, while he held the leadership position in 1972. 
 
 In contrast to Cantor’s unprecedented loss, New York Republican Sereno Payne holds the record for most wins for a sitting majority leader. He was renominated six times, starting in 1900. ||||| House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) gives his concession speech after a shocking upset to tea party favorite David Brat. (NBC 12 Richmond) 
 
 Eric Cantor just lost. 
 
 The defeat of the second-ranking Republican in the House by an ill-funded, little-known tea party-backed candidate ranks as the biggest congressional upset in modern memory and will immediately generate a series of political and policy-related shock waves in Washington and the Richmond-area 7th District. 
 
 "People don't know how to respond because it's never been contemplated," said one Virginia Republican strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly about Cantor's loss. (Worth noting: Cantor didn't just lose. He got walloped; David Brat, his challenger, won 56 percent to 44 percent.) 
 
 In conversations with a handful of GOP operatives in the aftermath of Cantor's loss -- a loss blamed largely on an inept campaign consulting team that misread the level of vitriol directed at the candidate due to his place in Republican leadership and the perception he supported so-called "amnesty" for illegal immigrants -- there were several common threads about what it means for politics inside and outside the House. 
 
 1. Immigration reform is dead. I'm not sure it was ever really alive in the House -- we've written plenty about how the average House Republican has zero incentive to support any immigration reform -- but Cantor's loss ensures that even chatter about making minor changes will disappear. Anytime an incumbent loses -- and particularly a well-funded incumbent like Cantor -- there are lots of reasons for the defeat, but this one will be cast as a rebuke of any moderation on immigration. Brat savaged Cantor as "100 percent all-in" on amnesty and accused him of "bobbing and weaving" on the issue. Any Republican member of Congress who was even contemplating going a step or two out on a political limb to vote for some elements of immigration reform will stop thinking that way immediately. Not only is immigration reform a no-go for Republicans in this election, but it may well be off the table -- assuming Republicans control the House -- for the next several years. 
 
 2. House legislative activity will cease. Again, there wasn't a heck of a lot of grand legislative plans before Cantor's loss. But that trickle will totally dry up now as Republican members avoid doing anything -- literally, anything -- that could be used against them in the many primaries still to come this summer and fall. Members will be afraid of their own shadows. 
 
 3. The "establishment strikes back" storyline will disappear. In the space of the last week, the narrative that the establishment has finally figured out how to beat the tea party has exploded. First, Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel finished ahead of Sen. Thad Cochran in the state's GOP primary. Now, the Cantor loss. (And, on June 24, Cochran remains an underdog to McDaniel in the Magnolia State runoff.) A former Senate Appropriations Committee chairman and the second-ranking Republican in the House both (potentially) losing in less than a month means that the primary victories of Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) over tea party-backed opponents earlier this year will be forgotten -- or, at the very least, overshadowed. 
 
 4. Tea party challenges will surge. David Brat -- and McDaniel if he wins -- will become the newest tea party heroes, taking their places alongside the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Mike Lee (Utah). In the near term, that will embolden tea partyers who seemed dead in the water in their own attempts to take out incumbents. "What we have seen tonight in Virginia shows that no race should be taken for granted and all the money and position in the world doesn't resonate with an electorate that is fed up with a Washington establishment that has abandoned conservative principles," said Joe Carr, a conservative trying to knock off Sen. Lamar Alexander (R) in Tennessee. (To be clear: Attempting to ride the Brat coattails with a press release is one thing. Beating an incumbent like Alexander is something totally different.) In the longer term, there's every reason to believe that other prominent members of the GOP leadership -- in the House and Senate -- will face tea party challenges come 2016. 
 
 5. The race to replace John Boehner as speaker is now wide open. We've written before about how difficult it will be for Boehner to hold on to his speakership -- assuming Republicans keep the majority this fall. But now the heir apparent has been dragged under by a conservative uprising. The third man in command -- House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) -- is not exactly a tea party darling or, stylistically speaking, the sort of hard-liner that the most conservative wing in the House likes. Add it all up and you are looking at what could be an absolutely bananas race to lead the House Republican majority come 2015. 
 
 Cantor's defeat will continue to send rumbles through the political system for the next few days -- and even weeks and months. Out-of-nowhere upsets -- particularly of such a high-ranking pol -- have a tendency to do that. What an amazing night. 
 
 Read more: 
 
 Eric Cantor and the biggest upsets in political history 
 
 Cantor's loss throws Congress into disarray 
 
 Did Democratic votes doom Cantor? 
 
 David Brat just beat Eric Cantor. Who is he?
– The House majority leader who used to cozy up to upstart Tea Party candidates has been crushed in his GOP primary by a little-known challenger from the movement, and analysts say America's political landscape is looking very different this morning. "The biggest Congressional upset in modern memory" will have far-reaching consequences, including the death of immigration reform, predicts Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post, noting that rival David Brat savaged Cantor for allegedly supporting an amnesty and other Republicans are now extremely unlikely to go out on a limb to support any elements of reform. House legislative activity is also likely to grind to a halt as Republicans become terrified of doing anything that could be used against them in primaries still to come, Cillizza writes—not that there were many "grand legislative plans" anyway. The defeat of the House majority leader isn't just rare, it's completely unprecedented in the history of the office, Alexandra Jaffe at the Hill finds. Since the office was created in 1899, there were 55 successful renomination bids before last night—and until Cantor's loss, House majority leaders were more likely to die than be defeated. With Cantor out, Tim Alberta at the National Journal predicts that Speaker John Boehner and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy could be next as conservative House GOPers push "for a wholesale change in leadership." He says that soon after Cantor's defeat, one conservative lawmaker told him, "They haven't been conservative enough. We've told them that for three years. They wouldn't listen." Cantor's defeat is a bad omen for moderates and is "mildly Shakespearian" in light of his early support for Tea Party candidates, write Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Steinhauer at the New York Times. But they suggest there could be more than policy behind his defeat. A House political analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report says Cantor—the most senior Jewish lawmaker in congressional history—"was culturally out of step with a redrawn district that was more rural, more gun-oriented, and more conservative." Cantor's religion, he says, was "the elephant in the room." Click for more on the man who handed Cantor his stunning loss.