Regan may have been tolerable, but nobody on the left liked Lee Atwater worth a damn. Whether or not McCain would have been elected is irrelevant to whether people like him or not- A lot of people who may like Rove don’t like McCain.
And John McCain supposedly hated Rove. His wife reportedly still blamed Rove for spreading the rumors that John had fathered an illegitimate black child (when they had in fact adopted a little girl from Bangladesh). I can’t imagine he played much, if any role, in the McCain campaign.
I agree that McCain would never had personally worked with Rove. But my point was that Rove’s tactics of “pissing off” liberals had the effect of firing them up. People who might otherwise have been apathetic about politics became active in opposition to Rove and this spilled over on to Republicans in general.
Maybe there have always be people like Rove and Atwater - people who did the dirty deeds so the guy up front could get the votes. But in the past, they were hidden in the background and not public figures. They weren’t out bragging to the media about the things they had done.