--- title: The GOP May Dread Sarah Palin’s Comeback More Than Democrats description: Alaskans on Tuesday are deciding on the state’s lone House seat. A leading figure: Sarah Palin, who is on a comeback tour with national implications. canonical: https://time.com/6206523/sarah-palin-primary-republicans-trump/ author: Philip Elliott article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-08-16T19:14:44.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-11T22:19:40.000Z article:section: Politics og:title: Palin Paved the Way for Trump. Could She Remake the GOP Again? og:description: Fourteen years ago to the month, John McCain announced he was picking Palin, the Alaska governor, as his running mate. og:url: https://time.com/6206523/sarah-palin-primary-republicans-trump/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltceef5caee297166d/698a34a347ca3890583b9e7e/GettyImages-1241812895.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: US-politics-VOTE-TRUMP-RALLY og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Palin Paved the Way for Trump. Could She Remake the GOP Again? twitter:description: Fourteen years ago to the month, John McCain announced he was picking Palin, the Alaska governor, as his running mate. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltceef5caee297166d/698a34a347ca3890583b9e7e/GettyImages-1241812895.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Sarah Palin Paved the Way for Donald Trump. Could She Remake the GOP Again?  by [Philip Elliott](https://time.com/author/philip-elliott/)  ## Philip Elliott Senior Correspondent Updated: Dec 11, 2023 10:19 PM UTCPublished: Aug 16, 2022 7:14 PM UTC  Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin speaks on stage during a "Save America" rally before former US President Donald Trump in Anchorage, Alaska on July 9, 2022. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin speaks on stage during a "Save America" rally before former US President Donald Trump in Anchorage, Alaska on July 9, 2022.Patrick T. Fallon—AFP via Getty Images  by [Philip Elliott](https://time.com/author/philip-elliott/)  ## Philip Elliott Senior Correspondent Updated: Dec 11, 2023 10:19 PM UTCPublished: Aug 16, 2022 7:14 PM UTC _This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up_ [_here_](https://cloud.newsletters.time.com/signup?nln=dc-brief&source=dc%5Fonsite) _to get stories like this sent to your inbox._ Moments that define history are seldom fully understood in the present. Even big events like the attacks of Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or even the release of the iPhone cannot be appreciated for what follows until, well, we see it. Catalyst usually aren’t recognized as such until years later. Significant events produce ripples; seismic ones, aftershocks. Which is why there’s a fitting tremor in the political firmament this week, a callback to one of those game-changing moments. Her name is Sarah Palin, and the spark was Sen. John McCain. Fourteen years ago to the month, McCain [announced](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/us/politics/30veep.html) that he was picking Palin, the Governor of Alaska at the time, as his vice presidential running mate, [plucking](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=5688565&page=1) a 44-year-old [hockey mom](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Conventions/story?id=5718030) with no real national [profile](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Conventions/story?id=5686244&page=1) as his understudy for leader of the free world. In doing so, he passed over tested contenders like Govs. Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney. The reporters traveling with the Democratic ticket of Joe Biden and Barack Obama were caught off guard by the selection, which dropped as we left the Democratic convention in Denver for a rural bus tour through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. Several of us [struggled](https://swampland.time.com/2008/09/04/axelrod%5Fon%5Fpalin/) with the proper pronunciation of her name as we pressed the exhausted campaign high command for spin. Was it _PAY-lin? PAL-en?_ Stories of that autumn are as abundant as they are manifest. Palin quickly became a force on her own, forgoing McCain’s carefully considered, legacy-eyeing rhetoric. In its place, she threw out [allegations](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26547877/ns/politics-decision%5F08/t/community-organizer-becomes-punch-line/) that Obama was “palling around with terrorists” and carried into the mainstream the false [birtherism](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/12/sarah-palin-birther/341659/) idea that Obama was ineligible for the White House because of his birth status. ([Fact check](https://www.factcheck.org/issue/obamas-birth-certificate/): Obama was born in Hawaii and was eligible for the job.) Objectively, Palin was [ill-prepared](https://www.politico.com/story/2010/01/palin-aide-warned-of-epic-debacle-031249), [under-informed](https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/close-read-the-palin-game), and not particularly interested in getting on the [same track](https://www.politico.com/story/2008/10/palin-disagrees-with-michigan-move-014253) as the Straight Talk Express. At times, she wasn’t even in the same station. Even before Election Day, the McCainiacs had settled on a [scapegoat](https://www.politico.com/story/2008/10/mccain-camp-trying-to-scapegoat-palin-015073) for his lurching campaign, and it was Palin. (They weren’t wrong. One [study](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/19/sarah-palin-cost-john-mccain-2-million-votes-in-2008/) goes so far as to [estimate](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0261379410000442) she cost McCain more than 2 million votes.) Not ones to flinch, Palin loyalists perhaps understood that the longer view would look different. They may have lost the vice presidency and McCain’s respect, but they had [reshaped](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/15book.html) American politics, a generational shift that would culminate in Donald Trump’s ascent. Palin returned to Alaska and her day job as Governor, at least for a while. She was seen as perhaps her party’s next [nominee](https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/close-read-the-palin-game) for President, given her ability to fire up crowds, and stoke anti-Obama sentiment at the high levels that the Republican Party desperately sought. With that attention, though, drew scrutiny. The national eyes that landed on her in August of 2008 didn’t leave in November of that year. What _was_ her record as Governor? How real _were_ those curious anecdotes about nepotism and side deals that seemed to show up from time to time that fall? And while the press—and Democrats—were at it, maybe they could figure out her actual beliefs this time before she made a play for the top of the ticket. Palin and her advisers looked around Juneau and made the cold—but probably correct—call that there was only [downside](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/us/politics/13palin.html) to finishing her first term as governor. The legal [bills](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/us/06palin.html) and open-records requests just kept piling up. On July 4 weekend of 2009, she abruptly [announced](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601090720,00.html) she was [stepping down](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sarah-palin-speaks-abc-news/story?id=8016906), but not out of the spotlight. Her work was done, and she set out to [settle](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/15book.html) her score with McCain’s campaign—and the GOP itself—in a tell-all memoir. She had already changed politics, making the mean subsoil the new top layer, bending facts and deploying innuendo to serve her agenda, and supercharging George W. Bush’s faux contempt for academia into a graduate course of proud ignorance. That new footing for the Republican Party drove it to a Tea Party-fueled majority in 2010, one that bedeviled Obama and his next six years. At one point, she was seen as a favorite to challenge Obama, leading reporters on a bewildering cat-and-mouse [chase](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-may-30-la-na-palin-bus-tour-20110530-story.html) that [looked](https://www.politico.com/story/2011/05/palin-swarmed-at-first-bus-tour-stop-055892) a whole lot like a campaign test drive with a [super-secret](https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2011/05/31/136821220/sarah-palins-mystery-bus-tour-keeps-rolling-we-guess) schedule meant just to spite journalists. She even made a [pilgrimage](https://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/31/palin-meeting-with-trump-in-new-york/comment-page-2/) to Trump Tower for a lunch of New York pizza. Palin ultimately didn’t get into the 2012 race, but her base also never really [warmed](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/the-tea-partys-mitt-romney-crisis/256008/) to Romney as the nominee, either. Palin’s reverberations in turn made Trump’s candidacy, nomination, and victory possible. Palin and her brand of brash Know Nothingism [redefined](https://time.com/6166232/jd-vance-popular-vote/) the Republican Party. Pugilism was now a sufficient stand-in for policy, Twitter trolling a substitute for truth, populism a proxy for pragmatism. It’s little wonder Trump found such a [foothold](https://www.npr.org/2016/01/23/464068087/how-sarah-palin-paved-the-way-for-donald-trump) in the party after Palin had spent the previous half-decade hacking limbs of long-held orthodoxy from it. Palin had created the path to power, even if she had none herself. Civility was for suckers, and the masses liked the products celebrity candidates like Trump and Palin were slinging. So, why revisit McCain’s choice that redirected the fate of his party? Because Palin is trying to make her political comeback. Alaskans on Tuesday used a [complicated](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/15/alaska-palin-murkowski-peltola-begich/) ranked-voting system to decide who will fill the balance of the late Rep. [Don Young](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/obituaries/don-young-obituary-alaska.html)’s current term in the House. They also ranked their preferred candidates in a primary roster for who will serve in the 118th Congress that convenes in January. The results of the former were [still unclear](https://www.adn.com/politics/2022/08/16/alaska-special-us-house-election-results-show-a-close-race/) Wednesday morning, but Palin was on track to be on the November ballot for the latter. Alaska remains a conservative state, but many have a tough time [shaking](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/us/politics/sarah-palin-alaska-voters.html) the feeling that Palin had her shot, walked away, and happily parlayed it into celebrity. Still, that Palin could find political redemption serves as something of a warning for D.C., given her history of showing loyalty to no party, players, or platform. Mainstream Republicans who [grouse](https://time.com/6120939/marjorie-taylor-greene-republican-party-future/) about the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boehbert would do well to brace for Palin once again becoming a power player in the Republican Party. After all, Palin has already remade politics once, and she may have her eyes on far more than Alaska’s desk in the House chamber. _Make sense of what matters in Washington._ [_Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter_](https://cloud.newsletters.time.com/signup?nln=dc-brief&source=dc%5Fonsite)_._ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6206523/sarah-palin-primary-republicans-trump/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6206523/sarah-palin-primary-republicans-trump/"},"headline":"Sarah Palin Paved the Way for Donald Trump. Could She Remake the GOP Again?","datePublished":"2022-08-16T19:14:44.000Z","dateModified":"2023-12-11T22:19:40.000Z","description":"Fourteen years ago to the month, John McCain announced he was picking Palin, the Alaska governor, as his running mate.","url":"https://time.com/6206523/sarah-palin-primary-republicans-trump/","keywords":["The D.C. 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