re: Which losing presidential candidate of the 2000"s ran the worst campaign?

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Romney.

Of the four, he had by far the greatest opportunity, and did the least with it.

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While I agree with the squandered opportunity, Romney straight up won the first debate and, if the media hadn't been completely in the tank, he would have leveraged that to victory - IMHO.

Let's look at the other 3, going backwards:

McCain with the Palin pick (and I thought she did great things in bringing attention and energy to the campaign, but they pushed her too hard and too fast, so she came off as a cliche - worked against the ultimate goal - she was still a better candidate than McCain, IMHO, so this was an execution failure, not necessarily a policy one) - and "suspending" his campaign. Just the height of silliness - we had a campaign in 1864, 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, 1968, etc.

Kerry was just awful - just awful. An awful guy running an awful campaign - again, if it weren't for the media being completely in the tank, that would have been a whole lot more lopsided (although the Iraq War was rightfully a loadstone around W.'s neck at that point).

Gore - he was caught in a tough spot - in addition to his being about as charismatic as bucket of paint, he couldn't run as Clinton's "third term" because, A. He was no Clinton, and B. Clinton had so tarnished his own personal image and that of presidency, that Gore tried to walk away from that. So, circumstances limited what Gore could do.

Couple that with being saddled with Tipper (Dem first ladies over the past 40 years just seem to all be universally terrible B-words - Carter being the only one, sort of, against type), although not as bad as THK or HRC, Gore had too many contradictions and not enough positives to overcome pre-Iraq, folksy, George W. Bush.


I'm going to say Kerry ran the worst, and was the worst candidate, by far.