McCain's lame response to the market drop and the economic crisis lost the election, period. Palin kept him in it rather than hurt him.
Palin was not THE problem but she was definitely A problem.
Maybe you live in a solid Red area where everybody loved Sarah but, elsewhere, among voters that were not Republicans (73% of all voters) Sarah Palin became, fairly or unfairly, the punchline to a joke.
This was not Palin's fault. McCain picked her, in spite of her inexperience, so McCain must shoulder the blame for any negative her inexperience and her very poor fund of knowledge brought to the ticket.
Face it, if you can't rattle off the names of 6 or 7 newspapers for Katie Couric, like any regular FR poster can, you are not reading from them online or from the paper copy. For the Governor of Alaska, that's fine. Politics are local. For a VP candidate, that is devastating and non-Republicans were horrified at the performance.
Even the very conservative daughter of a friend of mine from a family that has never voted for a Democrat President, ever, called her mother after the Katie Couric interview to say, "Mom! Palin was horrible in the interview with Katie Couric! Just horrible!!"
And, no, the daughter is not an Obama supporter. She is devastated that Obama won.
The question now is if Sarah Palin will be a winner or a loser in 2012 as the Presidential candidate.
It is my firm belief that a ticket with Sarah Palin at the head will be an electoral disaster of Biblical proportions.
Yes, the Republicans love her but Republicans constitute only 27% of all American voters and, today, 53% of all American voters have an UNFAVORABLE opinion of Sarah Palin and that is even before she has even been elected to any national office.