If you had to pinpoint the moment when Republican Richard Mourdock lost his Senate race against Democrat Joe Donnelly, it would probably be when the October 23rd debate turned to the topic of abortion. Mourdock created a firestorm while explaining his position on abortion in the cases of rape and incest.
“I struggled with it myself a long time,” he said, “but I came to realize that life is a gift from God, that I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape that it is something that God intended to happen.” Until that controversial statement, Mourdock had a narrow lead over his opponent. Mitt Romney was even featured in a TV ad endorsing him. From that point forward, Mourdock was on the defensive. Donnelly defeated Mourdock by over 100,000 votes.
The former Republican candidate is still trying to pay down some campaign debt, and in a recent email to supporters, Mourdock’s finance director went on the offensive. Why did Mourdock really lose the election? According to the fundraising letter, the candidate got “caught in the crosshairs of the liberal media.”
“Never has Indiana seen a more obvious example of media bias by reporters more interested in defeating conservatives than reporting the news,” says the email. “We fought back and invested heavily in a last-minute push to combat the slew of false accusations Democrats and the liberal media churned up to distract voters.”
So was it really “media bias” that doomed Mourdock? Or did RNC Chairman Reince Priebus have the Indiana Republican in mind when he reflected on his party’s losses by saying, “I think we’re pretty clear on some of the dumb things that were said over the last cycle”? Click on Hardball‘s Sideshow video above for more.
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