“Todd is in the race. That’s a fact,” said Rick Tyler, an Akin adviser. “They can either help or they can continue to abandon the race. And if they lose the Senate majority, they’ll have only themselves to blame.”
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Akin has lately gotten encouraging signs from local Republicans that appear to be buoying his resolve to stick it out — and hurting the party’s chances of taking the seat.
Two weeks ago, the Republican committee for the 8th Congressional District — representing more than two dozen Missouri counties — passed a resolution of support for Akin, the latest of several local Republican groups here to do so.
The campaign indicated Akin will announce next week that he has accepted invitations to debate after Sept. 25 — a renewed public statement of his intention to remain in the race.
But the division in Missouri is deep. Even the Missouri delegation at the Republican convention in Tampa expressed uncertainty. Some Missouri delegates wore “Akin for Senate” stickers as a sign of support, while others spoke openly about the shame he had brought the delegation.
“It was bad at home, it was bad on the road, it was bad at the airport, and it’s bad here,” said Kay Hoflander, a Missouri delegate at large.
Speaking off to the side from the delegation’s seats beside the convention stage, she said that before coming to Tampa, her local chairman’s office had been inundated with calls from former Akin supporters saying, “Come get this 4-by-8 sign off my lawn!”
When a storm canceled convention activities, the Missouri delegation hunkered down for a “Hurricane Dinner” of chicken and pizza at the airport Marriott and argued over their candidate.
At one table, Ralph Munyan, a Kansas City lawyer and delegate, listened as a fellow delegate told him she would not vote for Akin if he were the nominee. Another said many of her friends had “totally written off” Akin and intended to vote for McCaskill.
But Munyan, who was originally not a supporter of Akin and was also upset by the rape remark, nevertheless had taken to wearing an Akin sticker to protest party strong-arming and the way “the state party dropped Akin like a hot potato.”
That backlash — stoked by strong support from former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who has railed against party bosses — has tempered McCaskill’s expectations and heartened Akin’s campaign.
They say Rove’s remarks and the meddling of national Republicans have boosted fundraising.
And last week, a videographer appeared at a McCaskill event at the University of Missouri at Kansas City — trying, on behalf of a national pro-business group, to get the Democratic incumbent on video talking union issues. That could be a sign that national groups might find ways to get more quietly involved, despite the talk of skipping the race.
Fred Wszolek, a strategist who serves as the spokesman for the Alexandria-based Workforce Fairness Institute, confirmed that his group — represented in the state by the Coalition to Protect Missouri Jobs — sent the cameraman.
He said the group is not a campaign organization but that it merely wants to get McCaskill on record stating her opinion of “microunions,” department-by-department organized units recently allowed by a ruling of the National Labor Relations Board.
“We’re not playing in the campaign,” he said. “We’re engaged in issue conversation.”
The group is active in Virginia and Montana, two other key Senate swing states. Asked if the organization is likely to run ads in Missouri explaining to voters McCaskill’s view on the issue, Wszolek said, “I couldn’t say.”
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