With hindsight, when did McCain actually lose all hope of winning?

Great Debates
1

For me, the election was Obama’s to lose: the Republican ‘brand’ was too tainted. McCain had to hold in there and hope that Obama made a mistake while making no mistakes himself. But Obama made no mistakes, whereas, for me, McCain made one crucial one. No, not Palin - her appointment allowed McCain to shore up the base while he appealed to the centre - but his intervention when the financial crisis hit. It was a characteristically bold move, but it failed badly (it might have worked if he’d done it after the impasse), and with it, IMO, went any chance he had of winning.

Hindsight is wonderful; how say you?

2

Nah. It was Palin. The non-suspension suspension, which was also IMO an attempt to delay the Palin debate, just exacerbated McCain’s inexorable slide into the maw of defeat.

3

Nah. It was when Wall Street tanked. Though folks were beginning to realize what a ditz Palin is at the same time, I don’t think that was a huge factor. At worst they lost just the undecideds they picked up when McCain chose her.

4

I’d say 2004’s reelection of Bush is when the Republicans lost this election. If Bush had lost in 2004, he would have been considered a mediocre-to-bad president by the majority today. As it is, he’s considered godawful by the majority and he was going to take down any Republican candidate unless something happened even worse to take down the Democrat. It didn’t, so Bush did.

5

well, he made this one

‘I Would Make A Bad President,’ Obama Says In Huge Campaign Blunder

6

How did I know that that was The Onion without even hovering over the link? :smiley:

As I said, the election was Obama’s to lose. The issue of the thread is not when McCain actually lost, for he started from a losing position, but when he lost any chance of winning.

7

“The fundamentals of our economy are strong”.
Even if by some metrics the economy wasn’t so bad this comment made him look out of touch. What followed made him look clueless.

8

I’m not sure why there needs to be an identifiable moment at which McCain officially blew it. As you say, he was always behind. It didn’t require any blunder for him to lose, just a failure to close the gap. If you’re looking for a particular date, then I suppose it looked like being in the bag for Obama at some point around two or three weeks out. At that point there was nothing McCain could do to win, barring a mistake by Obama. No particular policy position or gaffe necessary for his campaign to be doomed, the probabilities just became insurmountable.

9

The polls more or less solidified after the second debate, so that seems as good a cutoff as any.

10

Supposedly between the second and third debates his advisers discussed telling McCain that he was unlikely to win. So they apparently agree with you.

I don’t think there was a single event that sunk McCain. He started with the odds against him and basically failed to make up any ground. Here’s a graph of the polls over time. Starting in the summer, and discounting a bump for McCain due to the GOP convention/Palin hype, Obama basically was ~5 points up the entire time. Obama simply avoided screwing up and McCain failed to find anything that changed the game. After it became obvious Obama wasn’t going to blow the debates there simply wasn’t anything more he could do.

11

McCain never had a chance. His opponent was named 'Barack Hussein Obama," a black man. Jeebus, if someone with a name like that could win, and black besides, anyone could. The Dems could have run the famous little yellow dog and won. Everyone was so sick of Bush they couldn’t bear to punch anyone with an R beside their name for President. The real wonder of the election is that McCain was able to hold onto any states outside the deep South.

12

McCain did as good a job as was possible in the circumstances. All else he could do was hope for an act of God or other Dem self-destruct. Not unreasonable really.

13

How calmly you all discuss it now!!! But I was lurking hither and thither for weeks before the election and read about chewed fingernails and sleepless nights and tummy aches from worry.

Heck, I’m a Canadian and I had all those symptoms.

14

If I had to choose a moment it would be with his nomination. The lack of organization and planning that I saw out of the McCain campaign here in Ohio was astonishing. None of us could believe how out of step and disorganized they were. Bear in mind I’m owner of a couple of newspapers here in this most swinging of states and I was in touch with both state level campaigns each week.

McCain’s people couldn’t take action or responsibility for anything and when they did it was poorly executed. It’s like they couldn’t avoid stepping on their own dicks every damn day.

Examples:

One weekend it was let out to the media that Palin would come to town. She’d be stopping to shake some hands. Word gets around from the campaign that she’ll stop at a local farm market, it also gets out that it’ll be a brief stop at an interstate. Hundreds of people gather at each place. She stops at neither and instead stops for 15 minutes, unannounced, at another farm market, buys some cider and runs off. Later we’re told she didn’t stop at the first two places because of ‘the crowds’. Get that again: the campaign didn’t want to stop because there were too many people waiting to see the candidate.

The following week Biden came to the same town and appeared on the lawn of the town Armory. Announced several days in advance it was organized well, drew between 1500 and 2000 people and Biden was on message and on time.

Another example:

I offered both candidates up to 1200 words to run in my papers. State their piece and make their case and we wouldn’t edit it at all. Obama’s people responded immediately and positively. I got copy, pictures, and friendly calls to make sure I had everything.

The state director for communications for McCain and his assistant took FIVE weeks to get me copy. I had to start calling McCain’s Senate Press office to get them to respond. I was at the point where I had to threaten to run ‘Senator McCain didn’t want to make his case to the voters of Ohio’ and a blank column to get their attention. Once I got it they then had trouble deciding which picture should run.

Yet another example:

House contacts. This is a strong Republican county with a Strong Democratic college town in the middle of it. Classic swing county, really. Obama set up a county-level office here early in the game and sent a guy to run all of his efforts here. Nice fella, from Tennessee or something. McCain never set up an office in the county at all and the local Republican party, those with experience getting out their vote, couldn’t get much in the way of yard signs or other campaign paraphenalia. The resorted to making their own for McCain/Palin and hoping for the best.

Also, on this level, McCain for Ohio didn’t do any calling in this county. The local Republican campaign manager, an experienced office holder here, developed a calling list of likely voters two months ago and had a bank working that list for local candidates in the last two weeks. It was ELECTION DAY when the McCain people contacted him and asked him to have his bank call ALL voters in the county. He refused and offered his list (vetted out for only likely republican voters) and the McCain for Ohio people’s response was to not call anyone.

Forgive me, but I think the campaign likely represents the man. McCain strikes me, from his image an actions, as an impulsive manager who believes that he, personally, can solve problems. That’s fine for him but it leaves those under him with no underlying direction or plan and the campaign, at least here in Ohio, reflected that.

15

Dammit, why can’t I live there? We got hammered with McCain calls here in Perry.

16

This is the man who got shot down over Vietnam because he ignored the missile warning from his plane’s radar, too hellbent on getting off a shot to break off his attack. It appears he ran his campaign with the same degree of coolheaded deliberation and forethought.

17

Another facet of the problem Jonathan Chance described so well: after securing the GOP nomination, McCain pretty much disappeared until Obama clinched the Democratic position. This let the Democrats seize the national spotlight, so that by the time his campaign became visible again I wouldn’t be surprised if a fair number of voters had all but forgotten who the Republican candidate was.

Granted it was pretty certain that the Republican campaign would be largely negative, which requires knowing the opponent’s name; still, getting his own name out in public would have helped when it came time for the main event.

ETA: another possibility was that the Republicans were counting on the Democrats to adhere to the “self-destruct” scenario, thus doing their work for them. Surprise!!

18

McCain was always a weak candidate, and always faced long odds. Even so, early in September, McCain had pulled even in most polls, and even had a small lead in a few.

It was the collapse of the stock market that did him in once and for all.

19

I’m going to have to go with Palin. Perhaps not immediately, but her long term negatives with the moderates/independents more than wiped out her short-term positives. The financial crash sped things up but McCain was already down several points from his post-convention high when the first major events started happening (Lehman Brothers). Palin would soon have a couple disasterous interviews, get mocked mercilessly on SNL and become known as something of an unqualified idiot to much of America. Combining a candidate widely seen as unqualified with a candidate where something like 35% of the voters worried about his advanced age and you’ve got poison.

I’m not suggesting that McCain would have definately won with someone else but I don’t see any way he would have won with Palin.

20

Thanks for writing this! Great stuff and interesting to read. Very enlightening.