Why did John McCain lose the election?

For me it came down to three primary reasons:

1) The Economy - You can clearly see in the polls that as soon as the financial crisis hit, Obama's poll ratings went steadily up, while McCain's went down. The Republican's had had the White House for 8 years and this had happened on their watch. Events went against McCain. His strong suit was not the economy but foreign policy and national security. These issues were pushed to the back ground. Obama is no king on the economy but his message of change resonated and the economic downturn helped him. It's ironic that the effect the economy has had on this election. A) It seems to be helping Gordon Brown (why i don't know) but it hurt McCain and the Republicans; and B) had the Democrats and GOP known that the economy would play centre stage surely the Presidential battle would have been between Hilary Clinton and Mitt Romney? It would have been interesting to see how that played out.

2) George Bush - Obama did a good job of linking McCain to Bush despite the fact that the two men often bitterly disagreed with one another. McCain didn't do a good enough job of distancing himself. Despite being a maverick and having a deserved reputation for reaching across the floor working with the likes of Ted Kennedy, McCain struggled to de-tar himself from the unpopular Bush-Republican brush. This hurt him bad.

3) Sarah Palin - A criticism of the McCain campaign was that we did not see enough of the 'real John McCain'. He had denounced the Republican Fundamentalist Right and yet ended up turning to them during his campaign when he hired former Bush aides but none more so when he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. I think this was a mistake but in defence of McCain, despite the fact that he was a maverick with bipartisan credentials, his message of change - in what undoubtedly was a change election whichever way it went - was never going to trump Obama's who had the advantage of being Democrat and physically embodied 'change'. I would argue that it was the failure of the 'real John McCain' that forced him to get in bed with 'devil'. One can still argue that he was wrong to do so, but he needed to change things and also needed to do something to get the Republican base excited about his candidacy. Hence the disaster of Sarah Palin. Yes, she did indeed invigorate the Republican base who had been distinctly lukewarm about McCain's candidacy but it came at a cost - he ended up alienating all the independents he used to attract. Furthermore, whoever thought that choosing a women would appeal to disaffected Hilary Clinton supporters was a moron. More charitably, she may have been chosen to indicate change (first female VP) and reinforce McCain's ant-establishment, anti-Washington message. Either way, i think it's fair to say the choice of Palin has to be seen as a mistake.

These are my top three reasons why McCain lost. There are other important reasons of course. One important reason was the huge support Obama had within the media which meant he got a soft ride, not just against McCain, but also against Hilary Clinton. Another reason was that Obama declined to accept Federal Funding, despite saying he would do so, which meant that he was able to vastly out-fundraise McCain which in turn meant that he could out-spend him. This meant that Obama could dominate McCain with his TV election ads; he could open far more campaign offices in each state than McCain; this far superior organisation was critically important in the ‘get the vote out’ drives; and finally, it meant Obama was able to inject funds into ‘safe’ Republican states, forcing McCain to use his limited finances to shore-up support in states he normally would not have needed to work too hard to keep.

In was always going to be a tough ask for McCain and so it proved.