Palin Helped, not Hurt, McCain

Or so says this guy. That's my gut instinct, too. It's of course a difficult thing to prove, because we cannot observe the counterfactual, and this campaign season was full of surprises, not the least of which was the near collapse of the financial industry which destroyed what little hope the Republicans had of keeping the White House. But, my sense is that Palin nonetheless seriously energized McCain's campaign, overcame a ton of his major weaknesses (like that his base hates him), brought Christians back into this race [ed: maybe... Karl Rove pointed out that there were 3-4 million missing "observant religious" voters compared to 2004], and gave McCain a pitbull to be on the constant attack while McCain could look like a person who would rise above typical politics (even if it did play a little bit differently than that, I think that was McCain's intention). In the end, I can't imagine Palin didn't help put a lot of those 150 some odd electoral votes in the McCain corner. Just remember, though. Correlation isn't causation, and you can only find causation by having some legitimate counter-factual to compare it to. But I'm not sure what that counterfactual is for a presidential election...