by Christina Elias

The 2012 Missouri Senate race between incumbent Claire McCaskill and U.S. Representative Todd Akin will come to a close Nov. 6.

If McCaskill wins the election, it will be her second consecutive term as a United States Senator. According to government teacher Pat Sirridge, Representative Akin’s support from the Tea Party, a “very conservative part of the Republican party,” and the lack of moderate and independent voters’ presence at primary elections was sufficient to win him the Republican nomination this summer.

“There’s no question that Senator McCaskill was vulnerable this year to not be re-elected,” Sirridge said. “Missouri has begun to shade pretty significantly to the Republican Party over the last five-plus years, and she was probably going to lose to a good Republican candidate.”

McCaskill has previously served as State Auditor of Missouri, Jackson County Prosecutor and a member of the Missouri House of Representatives. She graduated from the University of Missouri – Columbia with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and a Juris Doctor from University of Missouri School of Law. A former member of the Missouri House of Representatives, Akin assumed the position of a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2001, and had a promising chance of winning the election at the beginning of his campaign.

“He went from being five or six points ahead after his nomination this summer to five or six points behind, and that’s a pretty big swing,” Sirridge said.

Referring to the odds of a woman conceiving after rape, Akin responded by saying, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” The controversy caused by this infamous statement has sparked negative attention and declining public popularity for the Republican candidate. His comments have generated losses in support from fellow Republicans and women, as well as funding for his campaign.

“He completely shot himself in the foot when he made the comment about rape,” Sirridge said. “He’s very conservative anyway, and has taken some really extreme positions on a number of issues, including abortion, but this one made him sound not only extreme, but stupid. And when you have those two combined, you lose that middle part – you certainly lose [a portion of] the women’s vote and you lose some independents and moderates who think he just plain too right-wing for them.”

On the other hand, fellow government teacher Craig Whitney believes Akin’s controversial statements can be used to his advantage.

“Sometimes you see a candidate make some controversial comments, and because of how the media may take it and run with it and kind of beat it into the ground and show news clips of it over and over, there can be sometimes a bit of a backlash to that, where you’ll see parts of society that will come to the support of what they now see as the person who is being taken advantage of, abused in some way,” he said.

Whitney commented that Akin has almost been “turned into an underdog” by the media, with the possibility of drawing sympathy from some of the public.

“I think there are some people that have attempted to try and help his campaign, in part because they feel like he is being unnecessarily attacked and that the comments that he’s made have been overblown,” Whitney said. “. . . and so people will take offense to that and they’ll almost come to the aid [of Akin].”

According to both teachers, McCaskill holds a slight advantage over Akin in this election for several reasons.

“The incumbents, the people who already hold the office, if they ran for reelection; they almost always have at least some kind of an advantage,” Whitney said. “It may just be minimal, but they always have some kind of advantage . . . So McCaskill has a bit of a built-in advantage, primarily because of name-recognition. In this particular race, it’s close . . . because the state of Missouri has trended a little more towards conservatism. It’s always been reasonably evenly split for the most part. In the fairly recent past Republicans have started to make some gains in the state as a whole, so that would help, at least in some way, Todd Akin.”

“I think there are several reasons why [McCaskill] is in the lead, but the biggest reason has been a couple of miscalculations by Representative Akin; the first one of course being about ‘legitimate rape,’” Sirridge said. “That was a mistake he made in terms of being a politician, but it also hurt his campaign dramatically with women particularly. — He was exactly the candidate that Senator McCaskill wanted to run against, because she knew she probably would lose against either of the other two candidates.”

Sirridge stated that he doesn’t believe Akin can catch up to McCaskill by the time of the election for several reasons, Akin’s “unfortunate statements” being a key reason, among others.“When he made those statements, he lost a lot of financial support,” Sirridge said. “The big political action committees . . . pulled all their money from Missouri, or at least most of it, so he cannot go toe-to-toe with Senator McCaskill . . . and because he doesn’t have the money to match her advertising, that‘s another reason why he will not win probably.”