The Palin Network

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Prize Endorsement Palin’s presence, or nonpresence, became the focal point of many midterm-election campaign rallies.

By ROBERT DRAPER

Published: November 17, 2010

On the night of the midterm elections earlier this month, Sarah Palin stayed up until 3 in the morning. From her hotel bedroom in Manhattan, she and her husband, Todd, followed the returns while she wrote e-mails on her iPad — congratulating winners, consoling losers — while reading others from people who wanted her to know that they had cast their vote for her daughter Bristol on “Dancing With the Stars” the evening before. Like much of her recent life, Palin’s day had been replete with reminders of the clout she had rapidly acquired. She had spent most of her time ensconced at the Fox television studios, though she managed to squeeze in a jog in Central Park — which she promptly chronicled on Twitter: “Beautiful!” Also at the studios was her fellow Fox News contributorKarl Rove, who had recently questioned in a British newspaper whether Palin’s new reality TV series, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” made her appear Oval Office-worthy. The building was abuzz over what would ensue when the two would inevitably bump into each other. The moment came after Palin finished a segment with the anchor Bret Baier and saw Rove lingering stageside with Brit Hume, a Fox colleague, holding a well-marked copy of “Alaska for Dummies” — a prop clearly intended to mollify Palin. She laughed, used her phone’s camera to take a picture of Rove with the book, traded brief hellos and then left the studio without mentioning Rove’s earlier comment.

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Will she or won’t she? Palin said she was considering a run for the White House but that her discussions were still just within her family.

Of course, Palin’s purpose for being at Fox on Nov. 2 was to share her views on the midterm elections that she worked so vigorously to influence. It was indicative of the competing demands on her time that her participation in the campaign’s final days was weirdly anticlimactic. In the three weeks before the elections, Palin was bombarded with campaigning requests, many of them sent to her personal e-mail account. But her young son, Trig, was to have an operation — routine but still worrisome — on the Friday before Election Day, and so the mother was loath to commit to anything. Trig’s procedure went well. That evening, Palin’s political adviser, Andrew Davis, pulled an all-nighter arranging for her to make a Saturday drop-in on behalf of John Raese, the West Virginia senatorial candidate who was trailing the Democratic nominee, Joe Manchin, the popular governor. Raese’s wife, Elizabeth, had issued a personal plea to Palin to save the day.

After Palin arrived in Charleston, and exhorted the state’s “mountain mamas” to “keep Manchin in the mansion,” she and Todd flew to New York on Saturday afternoon. She was still mulling over several invitations to campaign along the Eastern Seaboard. One was a Tea Party Express event in Wilmington, Del., in support of the controversial senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell. Palin’s endorsement of O’Donnell over a more-moderate candidate had been catalytic to her primary victory. Later Palin authorized an adviser, Randy Scheunemann, and two others to go to Wilmington to help O’Donnell in her debate preparation. But this particular event for the woman who proclaimed “I’m not a witch” was on Sunday — Halloween — and Palin prudently elected not to attend. Instead, she spent the afternoon watching the New York Jets play from the luxury box of the team’s owner, Woody Johnson.

In Syracuse, meanwhile, the campaign staff for the Republican Congressional candidate Ann Marie Buerkle, who had erased her Democratic opponent’s double-digit lead, was begging for Palin to make an appearance. Despite significant logistical complications, Palin wanted to oblige them. But a story in Politico (“Next for G.O.P. Leaders: Stopping Sarah Palin”) that quoted unnamed party operatives fretting over Palin’s growing popularity had her juices flowing, and her schedule suddenly became cluttered with Fox segments, which allowed her a platform to fight back. (“Some within the establishment don’t like the fact that I won’t back down to a good-old-boys’ club,” she declared on Fox Business Network.) On the day before the elections, she could find time to record only one final robocall of more than 25 she made throughout the campaign cycle — this one forTom Tancredo, a third-party candidate for governor of Colorado whose strident remarks about illegal immigration made him a “destructive” force according to the Tea Party leader Dick Armey.

As it developed, Tancredo would lose by 14 points and Raese by 10, while Buerkle’s race was so close that a recount was imminent. The fate of another endorsee, Joe Miller — who was running for a U.S. Senate seat in Alaska against a Palin nemesis, Lisa Murkowski — remained in doubt. Palin had thrown her early support to two candidates backed by the Tea Party who wound up losing, O’Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada, which helped the Democratic Party retain control of the Senate. Nonetheless, it was a good night in Palin’s estimation: a majority of her endorsees won, the Republicans took the House and Bristol survived another round of voting on “Dancing With the Stars.” After three or four hours of sleep, the Palins took a commercial flight (economy class) out ofKennedy Airport on the morning of Nov. 3, headed back to Wasilla, Alaska.

Andrew Davis, her adviser, saw the Palins off, and I met him for coffee later that morning in Midtown Manhattan. Davis is a personable and quick-witted 33-year-old Massachusetts native who was a deputy campaign manager for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2004 and later an opposition researcher for the Republican National Committee before working with Palin at the close of the 2008 campaign. He’s nonetheless low-profile in the extreme, like all of Palin’s senior associates. (The New York Times Magazine’s photo editors had been trying to find an image of Davis; he assured me that they would not succeed.) Davis and his colleagues recognize that the issue of trust informs Sarah Palin’s every dealing with the world beyond Wasilla since her circular-firing-squad experience at the close of the 2008 presidential campaign. Her inner circle shuns the media and would speak to me only after Palin authorized it, a process that took months. They are content to labor in a world without hierarchy or even job descriptions — “None of us has titles,” Davis said — and where the adhesive is a personal devotion to Palin rather than the furtherance of her political career.

Davis’s main task this year had been serving as Palin’s point man throughout the endorsement process. He was now tallying her midterm scorecard, which at the time was 50 wins and 32 losses (with 8 not yet decided), including victories by 14 so-called mama grizzly Republican candidates. Some of Palin’s picks were early, bold and pivotal, as in the case of Nikki Haley, who is now South Carolina’s governor-elect. Other picks — like those for Tim Scott (South Carolina’s first Republican African-American congressman in more than a century) and Marco Rubio (the incoming senator from Florida and a rising G.O.P. star on par with Palin) — came too late to be consequential except, perhaps, to her own ambitions. Palin also raised more than $10 million for Republican candidates and committees — including the Republican National Committee, which plastered her image on the center of its Web page at the close of the election cycle. Having crawled from the wreckage of the 2008 presidential campaign and her much-derided resignation as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin had emerged as arguably the most captivating and influential Republican in America — and therefore a viable contender for the presidential nomination in 2012.

So I asked her political adviser whether there would be a summoning of the troops in the coming days to discuss what the next moves will be. Davis laughed and replied, “That’s not going to happen.” Each of them, he said, would simply be doing the work that was in front of them that day, the way things always operated in Palin World. I brought up an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken three weeks before, which concluded that Palin’s favorability rating among registered voters stood at 39 percent, while 54 percent viewed her unfavorably and a whopping 67 percent saw her as unqualified to be president. “On a staff level, we all think about ways we can improve her numbers,” Davis said. “It’s politics — that’s our job.” But, I pressed, had he discussed the subject with her? “I’m not going to sit around and ask her, ‘What do you think of your approval rating?’ ” Davis said. “I’m just not.” Then he added, “Maybe the family’s talked about it.”

“I am,” Sarah Palin told me the next day when I asked her if she was already weighing a run for president. “I’m engaged in the internal deliberations candidly, and having that discussion with my family, because my family is the most important consideration here.” Palin went on to say that there weren’t meaningful differences in policy among the field of G.O.P. hopefuls “but that in fact there’s more to the presidency than that” and that her decision would involve evaluating whether she could bring unique qualities to the table.