Just like McCain.. It was Dole's turn... Just like Hillary in '16...
Totally disagree. You may be suffering from a bit of confirmation bias/hindsight.
Thats a classic example of the opposition running against who they wanted to run against.
There wasn't "turns". The field was crowded with the Bush people signaling quietly that presumed front runner Guiliani was their preferred choice while staying neutral.
Huckabee won Iowa and had the evangelical vote going in to New Hampshire. A lot of momentum and was all over right wing media. He's still on TV today. Guiliani's people were stunned at the loss and you can argue his life has never been the same since. By the time all the New York transplants failed to vote for him in Florida he was out.
Romney had all the money, the establishment, Wall Street, and surprisingly good showings with veterans, women, and the suburbs, people though were McCain's bread and butter. He was the nominee during the next cycle on the strength of the apparatus he started building in 2003 or the apparatus his Dad build in 1963, depending on who you ask.
McCain was absolutely despised, almost a pariah with the party insiders, for his campaign finance deal with the Democrats, not to mention his endless list of tantrums, insults, and boorish behavior alienating everyone in Washington. People grossly estimate how much John McCain was hated by his "friends" even before he was a POW. McCain burned every bridge after 2000 when he felt the deck was stacked against him for W.
It was by far from a case of it was McCain's turn. Had he not won New Hampshire in a surprise over Romney, on the strength of Independent and Democrat voters crossing over to vote for him in New Hampshire, McCain would have been out of the race. And how did they do that? Democrat funded GOTV campaigns. Why would Demo dark money spend money on a popular Republican candidate? They wanted to run against him, not a photogenic successful Massachusetts governor with a history of purple policies like health care reform and numbers off the charts amongst women in the suburbs - the demographic that has determined every election since 1952.
I joined the McCain campaign in South Carolina the following month. I can tell you first hand, nobody thought it was "our turn". They were certainly paying us like it wouldn't even be our week next week.
He was down to his son, a travel aide, and about $50,000 in the bank before he started taking Democrat money to win to in NH. He was flying Southwest to Iowa and driving to NH in rental cars from DC. And that was despite more than a decade of national name recognition and the benefit of a Senate campaign finance law that allowed him to switch Senate donations into his Presidential account that non-Senator candidates couldn't do. (If you've ever wondered why so many Senators run for President with no chances of winning, this is why. They can harvest millions in donations made just in case he/she actually gets the nomination, run a rope a dope campaign, maybe knock out a candidate or two that their friends dont like, then convert the left over funds into their state re-election war chest and keep their seat safe).
We really didn't see an uptick in Republican side donations of any notable and sustainable amount until about a week after New Hampshire and they had the money to hire mercs like me.
And we didn't think we had any breathing room until after Florida where a purple Governor endorsed us in what was a purple state at the time.
After Florida, the way the convention rules were set up, we really only needed a hand full of states. So it was over by Super Tuesday. I went on to do other things by summer. Maybe that is why you got a feeling of it being his "turn" or "inevitable" or a smoke filled room picking who was going to lose one for the team. But it was simply a winner take all format where 5 early wins went it was basically impossible to knock you out. McCain won in three of them ... all purple states with folks crossing over.
In hindsight, with the Bush fatigue, Republicans could have run a Christ-Eisenhower ticket in 2008 and lost. But at the time, the Democrats were divided and Hillary Clinton divided the country. They were trying every thing imaginable to make sure the Republicans ran the weakest candidate possible. And the Republicans did. Because Democrats influenced who was running on the other side.
Speaking of Hillary, if she had a "turn" it wasn't in 2016, it was in 2008, and we saw how that turned out. We are talking about people spending millions to get billions in ROI. There isnt any "turns."
Its nothing unusual or bad. Not even sour grapes. Its the game. And gamers game or they are out. McCain showed twice he couldn't game at all. And the Palin pick just made it plain for everyone to see.
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