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.
well, just about everyone has “but for x they would have won”.
McCain had many of the same things though. Horrible economy? check poor natl security(in form of 65%+ against Iraq War)? check Watergate albatross? I’ll see you that and raise you 75% unpopular W and 90% wrong track poll numbers add on being outspent by close to 300M dollars. add on the black/hispanic vote being its highest ever and the white vote being it’s lowest ever. add on any number of loads of other factors.
historically though, holding 95% of the votes from the prior election, in a year where a party loses the WH, has been clobbered in 2 straight congressional elections losing 13 Senate Seats and 60 house seats, when youre outspent by 300M and outadvertised by an unprecedented margin, and especially under all the other bad circumstancds McCain was facing, was a pretty good showing all things considered.
I’ll always wonder what would have happened if 9/15-9/22 hadnt happened and Lehman, AIG, Fannie/Freddie never collapsed all in a row. I think we could very well have won an extremely close election. The economy was the final nail. Unprecedentedly bad economic news for 6 straight weeks right before the vote.
4-5X Bush over Kerry? Bush won by 3M votes. Obama by around 8M at my last count. That’s like 2.5X the margin, not 5.
I wouldnt exactly say a # of southern states. Id say 2, VA and NC, and NC was actually around 50-50 if you look at the total. FL isn’t really a southern state in my book. Clinton won in 96 and it was basically a tie in 2000(which Gore would have won comfortably if not for the whole Elian Gonzales thing which shattered him among the Cuban vote. Also you had the Jeb Bush factor). Not exactly a GOP stronghold. In NC Obama won by around 14,000 out of more than 2,000,000 cast while having a dem winning the gov race big and Dole getting clobbered, McCain outperformed both Dole and the rep Gov by quite a bit. But VA and NC are becoming less “southern”. In 2005 they had 4 Rep Senators, now they have 1. Both have dem governors. Other states like SC, GA, AL, MS, LA ALL have rep governors and 9/10 senators are rep. VA in particular seems to be trending away. I think McCain wins NC comfortably if the economy hadnt collapsed in Sept, although Obama’s massive spending played a big role there.
As for the fembot thing, I think she does get that as she doesnt really bring it up unless asked directly. Although she clearly seems to have a soft spot for title 9. And I have to be honest, I have way bigger issues than that at the moment.