Todd Akin

Yep.

Todd Akin, 2012 Senate against Claire McCaskill in Missouri.

You remember this?

Oh.

There is a governor's race that's more competitive in Iowa than people expected, and you tend to run together.

You know, I'll make you smile when I remind you, I was on the ballot when the top of the ticket was Mitt Romney and the second of the ticket was Todd Akin.

Once the ticket starts to tap...

Hank, brother, you could be you could be walking on water and you're not going to defy, you know, Todd Akin's numbers and and even Romney.

So I think, you know, Iowa, they've got a couple of good candidates, the Democrats.

But I still think it comes home.

We don't have to follow them." That was fifteen years ago, and I haven't forgot.

Okay, if you must know, Todd Akin was the person, and maybe that's not so surprising.

There are different classes of rich people, and they don't interact.

When I was younger, I was in a really bad environment.

I'm wondering if you see the same thing happening in Texas.

Do you see Cornyn voters staying home or worse, voting for Talarico?" Yeah, the Mourdock story Was interesting because it was happening at the same time that in Missouri, Todd Akin was talking about abortion, and then I think Murdoch also said stuff about abortion that was...

I don't know what Murdoch said now, but I, I think, was he the one, I believe he was the one who said that you couldn't get pregnant if you were raped? Something along those lines, something that was factually inaccurate and deeply offensive.

And, uh, that really hurt him quite a bit, and Lugar was way too liberal for the state.

Karl Rove has done this before.

Karl Rove sank Todd Akin in Missouri, the Republican nominee, because Akin beat his candidate in that primary.

He sank the Republican nominee in Maryland.

He sank, was it Maryland or Delaware? Kristen, I forget her last name.

The penalty was not enormous.

Just the... 14 years, we have moved from Todd Akin discrediting himself and being unable to be a serious candidate in Missouri for an abortion comment to certainly a candidate like that is confident he has a good shot in a Trump-y enough state.

So they have learned, like the candidate in the drug ad, they learned from watching you.

They learned from watching Trump.

You know, sometimes it's like a member of Congress getting a scandal that comes in late and that dominates something.

Sometimes it's somebody saying something really stupid in a debate, Todd Akin.

But it's also- Remember, this wasn't midterms, but in 2016, EpiPens.

EpiPen.

But to see this kind of widespread success of the DSA is not something that we have a precedent for.

And we have this Michigan race now being one that every Democrat has to answer for in the same way that Republicans had to answer for Todd Akin or for some of these other nominees in the past.

Do you all think that's going to work?

Well, look, can Republicans keep the focus on that? And again, this gets back to like, can they keep the choice front and center? Or is Trump going to make this about himself? Because the DSA stuff is scary.

Wow.

So it's not just that they're, like, not, you know, stepping away, like Democrats did on Platner, like even Republicans did back in the day on Todd Akin.

It's not even like that, that they're stepping away.

It's not even that they're just saying, you know, "Good luck, Max." It's like they're, they're saying, "We're putting in resources that could go to any Republican in the country, and we're gonna put it into this race to try to get this guy credibly accused by multiple Republican women that you know of, of assault and battery.