And Lieberman would've made history as the first man to run as VP for two different major parties just 8 years apart.
watch ... someone will correct me on that ...
The Jewish vote was 2% of the national total. It’s totally irrelevant. McCain got 21%, with Lieberman may be hets closer to 30%. With such a small total it makes no difference.
But what about FL you say? It wasn’t the Jewish vote thta was the problem there. McCain did just as well as Bush did in 2004. He actually did slightly better among the white vote than Bush did.
The difference was twofold:
1st, a big shift in the black vote to Obama.
2nd and more importantly, the hispanic vote went from 56-44 Bush to 57-42 Obama, a 27 pt swing to the dems.
Would Lieberman have done anything about that? Of course not. I wonder what could have happened since 2004 to cause such a massive shift in the hispanic vote? Could it have been the huge conservative and GOP opposition to immigration that everyone warned would cost us electorally in 2008? Looks like it did just that. A shame since McCain is actually the most pro-hispanic Senator in the GOP, but he took the blame for the larger opposition within th epary and the movement.
Also, Jeb Bush was Gov of FL and had a hispanic wife and was popular with hispanics and George P Bush was part of that hispanic outreach. The anti-dem backlash from the Elian Gonzales case that helped us in 2000 and 2004 probably diminished quite a bit as well. Bush and Rove had cultivated hispanics going back to TX and that helped us there. Immigration reform was an attempt to lock in 40% of the hispanic vote for the GOP. It would have been a huge benefit electorally. Oh well. Now, hispanics may be gone for quite some time.
But Lieberman wouldn’t have done anything about the big shifts in the black and hispanic vote that sunk us in FL. You can’t blame Palin for that either. McCain actually did better with white women in FL than Bush did. I wonder why?