Sarah Palin Loses as the Party She Helped Transform Moves Past Her

It’s hard to overstate the extent of the shock to the political system that Sarah Palin brought when she beat her first Republican colleague 16 years ago.

He is Frank Murkowski, the incumbent governor of Alaska and a towering figure in the 49th state. She is a “hockey mom” and former mayor of a small town for the elite. laborer, who swore to stick with the “good boys”. That race put her on the map with the national Republican Party and set her on a path that would change her life, and shape US politics for years to come.

Later, Ms. Palin was a pioneer of the whistling, no-apologizing political culture that former President Donald J. Trump now embodies.

Today, lost his bid to Congress After years of going unnoticed, Ms. Palin is a much-diminished force.

In many ways, she’s been turned upside down by the same political trends she pushed to national fame, first as Senator John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee in 2008. and later a popular star of Tea Party and Fox News. At the same time, she helped redefine the outer limits of what a politician can say when she made dark allusions to Barack Obama’s background and false statements about ” government death tables” can deny health care to the elderly and people with disabilities.

Now, a generation of Republican stars follows the mold she helped create as a hybrid celebrity-politician who enjoys fighting elements of her own party as well as her own. struggles with the Democratic Party – none other than Mr. Trump, who had been watching her closely for years before that. decided to run for president on his own. He assures this month that he will always be in the spotlight, announced another bid for the White House in 2024.

But as the next generation grows up, Ms. Palin’s brand of politics doesn’t seem new or outrageous anymore. In addition to Mr. Trump’s lies about a massive plot to deny him a second term, or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s random allusions to political violence, her provocations are provocative. Palin over a decade ago seemed almost odd.

Ms. Palin, 58, got her start in politics after a surprise victory in the 2006 Alaska governor’s race, when the Republican Party was in need of a new face. Republicans have just suffered a crushing defeat in the midterm elections – what President George W. Bush called “”pounding.” The GOP’s conservative base was angry with party leaders for their support of the immigration reform bill. And the broader public is war-weary after five years of conflict in the Middle East with no end.

Ms. Palin is as different from a Bush Republican as they come. She promised to do things as governor that politicians in her party don’t usually do, such as reinstating the social welfare fund and scrutinizing the tax breaks her state offers. It’s for big corporations. She also attracted the attention of Alaskans, making them distrust outsiders like oil companies, seafood, and federal agencies.

She prides herself on being able to work across parties. One Democrat with whom she developed a relationship in the state Legislature is Mary Peltola, who has now defeated Ms. Palin twice – for the first time in her career. a special election in the summer to fill Alaska’s only congressional seat and now for a full two-year term. Ms. Peltola was the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress and Ms. Palin spoke of her enthusiastically despite their political rivalry.

But Ms. Palin has long shown a willingness to make well-founded claims that her opponents are unreliable because they are different, and hinted that those differences stem from a lack of patriotism or Christian faith. In the 1996 race for mayor of Wasilla, she brought the country’s culture wars to the front of city hall, advocating biblical and Second Amendment principles. She suggested – erroneously – that her election would give Wasilla the city’s “first” Christian mayor. (Her rival and incumbent mayor, John C. Stein, grew up Lutheran.)

Palin’s supporters have always been drawn to her not only for the battles she chooses and the enemies she causes — people she despises as “blue blood” in the GOP leadership and “means of outdated media” are her two favorite targets – but also because of her mediocrity. She is a working mother with a young son with Down syndrome, a teenage daughter who became pregnant as soon as the Palin family was introduced to the nation in 2008, and a recovering son. service in Iraq.

When Mr. McCain chose her as his running mate, he told advisers at the time that he knew it was a gamble and featured it. colorful term that’s what he likes about it. In the end it was a Hail Mary that failed. Ms. Palin’s youth and freshness were balanced with McCain’s image as a longtime, aging resident of Washington. But her lack of experience in national and world affairs made her a liability. Sometimes she struggled to answer basic questions like the newspapers she read.

But for the legion of followers that seemed to grow larger during the campaign — at a rally in Florida retirement community The Villages, 60,000 people turned out to watch her speak — mistakes only makes her more real. And as she became more famous, her language became sharper and more agitated.

At one point, with the help of McCain’s campaign speechwriters, she came under widespread condemnation after accusing Mr. who at the time considered an allegation of racism, barely covered up. (False rumors that Mr. Obama is secretly Muslim have long circulated among conservatives.) Her protests began to draw outrage from the crowd when she mentioned Mr. Obama’s name. Everyone shouted “treason!” and “Obama bin Laden.”

Many assumed that Palin was politically dead after McCain’s loss and when she resigned as governor a few months later. But for many Republicans, especially those outside of Washington, she remains the biggest star in the party. She went on to write the best-selling memoir, “Going Rogue,” and signed a $1 million-a-year contract with Fox News.

Initially, she was seen as the leading candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, sometimes beating or slightly behind the final candidate, Mitt Romney, in the polls. And when she embarked on a bus tour of the East Coast over Memorial Day weekend in 2011, she attracted so much media attention that news of her stop in New Hampshire broke. Pushed Romney’s presidential campaign announcement that same day off the front page of the local newspaper. paper.

It was on that trip that she made a fateful visit to Trump Tower at Mr Trump’s invitation, where the two met and posed in front of a crowd of paparazzi waiting on the sidewalk before stopping at a salon. nearby pizza to eat slice. (Infamously, he ate with a fork.)

At the time, many in politics thought she was highly likely to run for office. But privately, she has expressed doubts about the damage another campaign will do to her family. And when a group of Republican activists met her near her home in Scottsdale, Ariz., to convince her of the idea of ​​running for office — including two future Trump campaign officials. hybrid, Stephen K. Bannon and David N. Bossie — she conveyed a lot.

Ms. Palin was never really able to rekindle the fire she lit during the 2008 campaign, when she was a quiet rebel to Mr. McCain’s elder statesman.

In 2016, she again refused to run to become the Republican nominee, clearing the way for the next Republican insurgent: Mr. Trump. He asked her to testify before the Iowa caucus in February, and she obliged. In a column she wrote later that year for Breitbart, Ms. Palin happily recalled what a friend told her about why she liked Mr. Trump so much: Liberal Party, Party The old republic and the media couldn’t stand him. “I love him because YOU hate him!” Ms. Palin said her friend told her.

Palin’s reversal of political fortunes today means that many of the rebels who have imitated her — and many of her opponents — have outlasted her. Lisa Murkowski, daughter of former Alaska governor Ms. Palin was defeated 16 years ago by more than 30 points, won a bid for another term in the United States Senate. (Republican Murkowski endorsed Peltola, the Democrat who defeated Palin on Tuesday.)

Ms Palin, never particularly sensitive to public service, has often appeared disengaged in what is believed to be her comeback and resurgence campaign as a national conservative icon. Although she entered the race with the highest title of any competitor and backed by Mr. Trump, she struggled to raise money until the end.

And she keeps a light schedule. In the final days of the election, with little time left to campaign, she was spotted at a Knicks game in New York.