Yeah. Run statewide on a platform of doing away with Social Security and Medicaid and the minimum wage and see how well you do.
If Akin was a “disaster waiting to happen”, he certainly would not have enjoyed a long and successful career in the House.
He ran in a conservative district without any real opposition for five election cycles and not a lot of publicity. No mystery about it.
McCaskill took an enormous risk in trying to get Akin to be her opponent, and it just as easily could’ve blown up in her face.
McCaskill knew exactly what she was doing. She knew she was going to have a hard campaign to begin with and knew that Steelman and Brunner would have been much harder candidates to run against. Aikin was her best chance...and she was proven right.
Many Conservatives favor privatization of Social Security, that’s not an extreme position. Neither is getting the government out of the business of health care or setting minimum wage (which has gone a long way into killing jobs and increasing the cost of goods and services). A good Conservative can articulate these visions.
As for his district, with those known positions, if they were that “unpopular” or “extremist,” he could’ve been defeated (either in the primary or general).
As I said, again, McCaskill took a risk. I might remind you that Steelman had her own baggage. Did you forget the lengths to which the MO GOP sandbagged her primary candidacy for Governor ? I think more than a few establishment types in the party would’ve more than helped McCaskill to eke out a win in the general, so the result would’ve been the same.
I’ll say that based on the information I had at the time, I endorsed Akin as the most Conservative candidate with an electoral history of winning. Steelman was too risky and Brunner an unknown. There was no reason to think Akin couldn’t win, and the polling data AFTER his nomination showed he united Missouri Republicans behind him. This was an “X” factor that sank him that no one could foretell, otherwise you are ascribing supernatural clairvoyance to McCaskill, and that’s really a stretch. I’ll say it once again, it was a risky bet, and it paid off. Absent Akin’s gaffe, it could have easily seen her end up with a 15-20% blowout loss, and we’d be hearing no peeps from the after-the-fact critics of Akin.