House Majority leader Eric Cantor loses the primary at the 7th congressional district of Virginia against Tea Party challenger Dave Brat. The defeat of Republican’s second-in-command at the House of Representatives for a nomination may be the biggest political upset of the year.

In a report by CNN, the network’s political analyst David Gergen described Cantor’s lose as an “earthquake” that would send “shockwaves through the Republican ranks.”

The 51-year-old legislator conceded the race with 99% of the precincts reporting from the Richmond-area district showing him trailing Dave Brat 56% to 44%, the Virginia Secretary of State’s website said.

“I know there’s a lot of long faces here tonight, and it’s disappointing, sure,” Cantor said, speaking to his supporters. “I believe in this country; I believe there’s opportunity around the next corner for all of us.”

According to NPR’s Ron Elving, Cantor’s defeat is, “Truly stunning and all but unprecedented for a speaker-in-waiting.”

“Going into the elections, most Republicans had been watching how broad Mr. Cantor’s victory would be, with almost no one predicting that he would lose,” the New York Times reported.

The Guardian said that it is possible that Cantor could run as a write-in candidate for the relatively safe Republican House seat in Virginia’s 8th district, which is near Richmond.

His defeat, however, will have repercussions on a party leadership that thought it had survived the 2014 primary election season with little damage from the Tea Party.

The conflict between mainstream Republican leaders in Washington and more conservative Tea Party lawmakers has dominated US politics in recent years. The bickering and disunity has led to the government shutdown last year.

The move by House Speaker John Boehner and Eric Cantor to face down their Tea Party counterparts over its shutdown demands was thought to have taken the momentum out of the upstart movement and a number of mainstream Senate incumbents had recently seen off primary challengers from the right.

The man who defeated the second most senior member of the Republican party in Congress, Dave Brat, is an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College.