Why don't losing presidential candidates run again?
It used to be that a candidate's first need was support of party leaders in the various states. Now, the first need is money. A big donor, or the head of a superpac, looks upon a candidate and says: "Last time I gave you $nnn, and what did I get for it?" I think Bush was vulnerable to Gore in 2004, and if Gore had run, would have beaten Bush. But he would have had to make the election a referendum on Bush's conduct of the 'war on terror', especially the Bush administration's mismanagement of the Iraq occupation, and I think Gore was unwilling to do that. He was concerned with different issues. The presidents who won coming back from a loss were Jefferson, Jackson, W. H. Harrison, Cleveland and Nixon. Nixon is the only one with another president's term intervening between the loss and comeback. I think the last runner-up to win a second nomination, apart from Nixon, was Thomas Dewey, unless you want to count H. Ross Perot, who tried again after a very strong 3rd-place, but didn't do as well the second time. Before Dewey, it would have been William J. Bryan, who was nominated three times. I'm afraid you're mistaken about Seymour. He tried against Grant once. Grant's second opponent was Horace Greeley. Grant tried for a third term in 1880 but lost the nomination to Garfield.
Would Trump be President today if McCain defeated Obama in 2008?
Probably not.First, the odds of McCain winning were low to start with. As a nation, we generally don’t like having one party in charge for more than eight years. But that’s not impossible to overcome; 1988, 2000, and 2016 all stand as examples of this (the last two of course being popular vote wins for the party in power, but electoral college losses).A bigger pair of problems were the economic collapse in 2008 and the selection of Sarah Palin as vice-president. While it isn’t entirely correct to blame the 2008 crash on the Republicans, that’s what happens when there’s an economic collapse of that size.And it certainly is completely fair to blame McCain for his choice of Palin as his running mate. She was just awful, and this was his first major, really important choice as a presidential candidate. It said a lot about his judgement, and none of what it said was good.But let’s say things were different and he’d won in 2008, gotten re-elected in 2012, and left office in 2016. If his vice-president wanted to run, they’d have almost certainly gotten the nomination that year. That’s just how it generally goes. Biden, for example, could have probably had the nomination had he really wanted it and fought for it.But even if the VP hadn’t wanted to run, it would have been harder for the Republican candidate, whomever they were, to win. As said, we don’t generally like the same party to be in charge for a long period of time, and in this case, we’d have been looking at four consecutive Republican terms. The odds of any Republican winning that environment were low. I think you’d have to go back to Truman in 1948 to find something similar, and we all know how that looked right up until the end.There were a lot of really unusual circumstances in 2016, and it’s an election that’s going to be analyzed for a very long time. Change even one of those unique set of circumstances and likely you wind up with someone other than Trump as president.
Why does McCain always fiddle with his wedding ring when he's checking out Palin?
That's a classic sign of sexual attraction. That's interesting. After Obama's speech, maybe he figured he was going to lose anyway...why not spend the time with someone who's hot?
McCain went to the Naval Academy and came in 894th out of 899 students in his class. Is he dumber than Palin ?
Isn't it bizarre how a person can claim that Obama went to school on affirmative action, or didn't pay..and knows his grades...WITH ABSOLUTELY NO PROOF AT ALL?? talk about dumb. The question is about McCain. Understand that he had family in the military and people get into the military academies by referral. You can assume NOTHING about how he went there. Persons who knew him there, are NOT complimentary, and records show he crashed several planes. Intelligence often has nothing to do with personal character. His record in Congress is not great.. if you talk to people who actually work with him. This is his second attempt at President, and common knowledge is that money is often the force behind elections. He was behind prior to the convention. Many reports claim that he had no intent to pick Palin, but rumors support her being chosen for anti abortion views. I suspect oil would pay a lot to get her OUT of Alaska, since as VP, she would have to go along with the party: NO windfall taxes. Take a hard look at the people advising him, and ask if they push to run a campaign on "win at any cost" rules. Someone power hungry is likely to grab on to anything, if he has too much ego to face maybe losing. It backfired.