Many reasons have been given for Obama’s win over McCain, most are wrong. It was not because of minority group support, a poor McCain campaign, pro-Obama media bias, his being black, anti-Bush bias, and so on. I was carefully watching the Real Clear Politics daily national average of poll numbers through the campain. The trend line of this average is shown here.
In the first days of September, McCain’s poll results were rising fast and he had surpassed Obama in most Battleground States, and on the electoral count. September 9 was McCain’s best, as can be seen in the trend line shown in the link above. And this was the day that the Secretary of Treasury Paulson and Chairman and a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Bernanke gave their speech in Washington warning about the growing mortgage and credit crises, and announcing the steps they were taking to deal with them.
From that day onward, the crises was taken more and more seriously, and became a most “dangerous” national economic crises. On September 11, the Dow Jones fell 14.3%, and although the DOW recovered somewhat subsequently, with fear about the economic crises growing to into a Great Depression, it was on a steep decline before the election.
This crisis and the fears it generated destroyed McCain’s campaign. Had their not been this September-October surprise, the rapid rise of his poll numbers and their surpassing Obama’s, well show why McCain lost—-it was the economic crises alone.