Some thoughts on Eric Cantor’s defeat:

1. In the spring after Obama’s 2008 election, I was stuck on a long drive and spent some of it listening to an event on the future of Republican politics that featured Cantor, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush. Bush was by far the most impressive of the three. When he talked about shifting policy to deal with everyday concerns, it didn’t feel like a hustle.

Bush probably has a principled disagreement with the modal Republican primary voter on future immigration flows. He wants more future immigration than most Republican primary voters, but it doesn’t have to hurt Bush as much as it hurt Cantor. Bush seems to believe that increasing future flows of immigration (even low-skill immigration, despite high unemployment and stagnant wages in that sector of the labor market) is a good thing in itself. He doesn’t come across like the Haley Barbours, John Boehners, and (yes) Eric Cantors who often seem like they are advancing the current version of comprehensive immigration reform more to serve the interests of the lobbying and donor classes than to increase the party’s electoral support — and insulting the intelligence and decency of the Republican base in the process.

Bush has a chance to be a candidate who gets the support of K Street without being the candidate from K Street, and he should be able to find plenty of common ground with Republican primary voters on other issues. That doesn’t mean he would be the favorite. He would need some luck. The fresher candidates who might get establishment support (Christie, Scott Walker) would have to self-destruct. Bush’s main populist opponent (which is to say the candidate with more support from talk-radio listeners than from the business lobbies and the Washington-based consultant class) would have to seem like an implausible nominee to the key “somewhat conservative” voters that decide Republican presidential nominating contests. Stranger things have happened.

2. I couldn’t have picked David Brat out of a lineup two days ago, but something struck me about his comments yesterday. Brat called out the business lobbies and the Washington political class for wanting to increase future immigration flows in order to increase employer leverage over workers. Don’t take Brat’s word for it. Take the word of the Rubio aide who argued for increasing the number of guest workers in the construction industry so that businesses would not be stuck with having to hire from the current population of unemployed who “can’t cut it.” Brat wasn’t anti-immigrant.

3. One of the craziest things about our immigration debate is how off topic much of it seems. If Republicans want to do better among recent immigrant populations, it would seem that the way to do that would be to work to . . . improve the lives of the people in those populations. An eventual amnesty would probably be an important part of such a policy, but increasing future low-skill immigration has just about nothing to do with it. An agenda for fully integrating recent immigrant populations and improving the economic prospects of low-skill workers of all ethnicities could help Republicans (and more importantly the country), but that isn’t what we are talking about. We are stuck with an argument over increasing future low-skill immigration — a policy that would help the business lobbies and the Left, but would do nothing for the long-term health of the Republican party.