With all this great polling, and continuing to see McCain's slide, I have an interesting point to ponder:
Remember that no one is officially nominated until the convention. What if they drop McCain?
We all had concerns in 2004 that all it would take as an "excuse" for Cheney is him saying his heart can't take it, and Bush would get to replace him with a ringer (Powell, Rice, etc.) What about McCain? Fake some medical scare, he drops out before the convention, and re-opens the convention to essentially nominate anyone they want.
I would assume they would set it up so whoever McCain picks as his Veep would be the logical successor.
Now... the good news is the GOP bench isn't all that strong. I always thought Huckabee would run best against Obama (lock down evangelicals and the solid south, solid in states like Nebraska, pulls the map closer to traditional 2000/2004 even-ness).
The question is.. would this fly???
If you were the Republicans and McCain was about to be your Mondale, would you:
a) stick with it and regroup
b) Upset the fruit basket and take a chance the American people would accept a new nominee as not being a dirty trick
c) use the new nominee, who would lose, as a building block for 2012?
It would be unprecedented- but at this point nothing the Republicans do to justify their existence would surprise me.
