By the way, 2008 was an outlier. The electorate has been intensely polarized since the 90s. 2008 is what happens when one candidate has the perfect storm of charisma, economic collapse, and an incompetent challenger. If the stock market hadn't crashed in such a big way and McCain had picked someone sane as his running mate, we would have seen a typical new Millennium election where one side wins by a small margin.
I'll dispute that. Despite the ribbing she deservedly got, on the whole Palin was a small plus for McCain. It was the top of the ticket that did in McCain/Palin, not the bottom. McCain's pathetic response to the crash was what did the ticket in.
I have to disagree. McCain was pretty well respected even among Democrats before he chose Palin. McCain made tons of mistakes and the buck should always stop at the top of the ticket. But Palin, while briefly shaking up the campaign and energizing their base, became a huge liability. I have never before seen so many people that scared at the prospect of someone on a ticket running the country. It wasn't just doubts about her policies, it was real doubts about whether she was smart, competent or level headed enough to handle the job, especially if she had to take over and serve as President. She lost McCain a lot of voters who should have been 100% in his corner. Why do you think he lost Indiana?
Yeah in "
Game Change", in an Obama campaign focus group there was a lady who shouted about how Obama was a Muslim communist socialist. When Plouffe and Axelrod asked her why she was still undecided, she replied something along the lines of "I'm afraid of Palin becoming POTUS". I lol'd so hard at that.
