One thing to consider, even in McCain’s loss, he still held about 95% of the vote that Bush got from 2004. Bush got 62M, Mccain got around 58.5M as of now, that may grow a bit when all is said and done. Still the 2nd most votes a Republican has ever gotten. For all the effort the media put in to elect Obama, and in the end it paid off, there were still at least 59M or so who saw through their facade, who didn’t buy into the hype. Who can be counted on as a potential base of support going forward.
Compare McCain’s 95% retention rate to other past instances when a party lost the WH or the incumbent was defeated.
In 1992, Bush41 held about 82% of the vote he got in 1988. He plummetted from 48M in 88 to 39M in 92.
In 1980 Carter held about 85% of the vote from 76. He dropped from 41M to 35.5M.
In 1976 Ford held about 82%. He dropped from the 47M Nixon got in 72 to 39M.
Humprhey in 68 dropped almost 30% from Johnson in 64. From 47M to 34M.
The point is that historically speaking, McCain did a pretty remarkable job in holding on to the votes that the party had from the last election. Most times a party loses power/an incumbent loses, they bleed a much greater maount of votes than we did this year.
I attribute a good portion of McCain’s retention to Palin. If he had put Lieberman or Ridge on the ticket, he’d have been down in the 80-85% range of Bush41, Carter and Ford, not in th 95% he got.
All true jeltz ( I know you keep track of such things) however Gov Palin can do what McCain cannot...grow the Base of the Republican Party via her personality and her ideals.
astounding actually......
zero for all his advantage, nearly blew it.....if a few more had bothered to read about him, he would have been trounced....
I’m going to answer each of those....but you do make a decent point about Mccain...which had a lot to do with Palin being on the ticket....
Bush One got hit by Perot or he would have won, it’s an unfair precedent
Carter was a dead duck even though he led in early and mid election polls....horrible economy and poor national security
Ford had the Watergate albatross
Humphrey inherited Vietnam and student and black unrest from LBJ...Nixon looked to restore order to the vast majority who did not support leftism including most students and to find a decent way out of SE Asia
so, none of those comparisons really fit this time except the bad economy which is still so far not nearly as bad as 1980.
Obama got 4-5 times the margin of victory Bush did against Kerry. We lost a number of Southern states mainly due to non southern transplants and younger and black voters. We got clobbered in Congress. It was not a rout but rather a stern rebuke.
Oddly enough Tennessee here went GOP in the statehouse for the first time since Reconstruction.
I don’t feel we have any choice but to go back to the right in the GOP...if we go centrist we will be much like the Clinton Part Deux triangulation it looks so far the Messiah is aiming for.
for the record, I’m a hard right social and cultural militant and brook little tolerance for political correctness.
My only beef with Palin whom I broken glassed for is when she gets on the glass ceiling stump like with Greta...that I could please do without.
Middle aged white guys are her base....not kids and not enraptured fembots who now love the pro-life movement simply because she is a woman.
I hope she gets that.
I think it was more of a case of the democrats prefecting voter fraud, they got pretty close to doing it in 2000 so they screamed the republicans stole the election. with acorn and Venezuelan voting machines i would say the fix was in.
It’s actually now 59.4m, only 2.6m less than Bush in 2004 (Wikipedia)
Yesterday we were talking about GOP turnout, voter #s and the like. See Reply No. 23 above for an interesting analysis and cause for hope...