Here's a hypothesis that could be tested statistically: that it's bad tactics to turn on your own party's candidate, since it supports the idea your party is fallible and weak. Turn-out for your entire ticket depends on maintaining team solidarity.
It could be argued that it was stupid to turn on Akin—that the cost to the entire GOP brand and all the candidates running that year was greater than any benefit from getting Akin out, once the campaign was in full swing. This is not a moral issue. It's not as if he's a bad man.
The hypothesis proposes that in this situation the GOP needs to think more like Democrats, who never apologize and never explain. It doesn't mean that "gaffes" are without cost, but that, once a bad quote gets out, among the possible outcomes for the party from that point forward, "moving on" with the campaign might statistically be shown to produce a better result.
It's true that press treatment of real or imagined missteps will never be similar between the Dims and the GOP, but that's the playing field. It seems to me this could be tested, and should be.
It is quite conceivable, for example, that Karl Rove's very public reaction to Akin did more damage to the party's candidates than Todd Akin himself did.