Whatever Happened To Sarah Palin?

John McMain's relationship with Sarah Palin, and especially the fact that he selected her to be his running mate in the 2008 presidential election, made her one of the biggest stars in conservative politics. The Governor of Alaska was pulled out of relative obscurity and pushed into the spotlight, and her candid approach matched McCain's reputation for being a maverick, giving the campaign a much needed boost. With her thick Alaskan accent and quotable lines about hockey moms and pit bulls, Palin didn't fit the usual GOP mold at the time, though she would play a role in setting the table for the political party's future.

It wasn't long before family drama, political scandals, and Palin's poor performances in interviews turned her into an albatross around John McCain's neck. She eventually became a failed candidate in the state that once gave her an approval rating of 82%. Revelations about Bristol Palin, her daughter, being pregnant at 17 pushed against Palin's family values ethos, and her answers in an interview with Katie Couric were so laughable that "Saturday Night Live" used some of them verbatim. The McCain/Palin ticket came in second in a two-party race, sending McCain back to the U.S. Senate and Palin back to Alaska, where her damaged reputation and mounting legal troubles forced her to resign from public office in July of 2009. But her time in the spotlight wasn't over yet.

After stepping down as the Governor of Alaska with two years left in her term, Sarah Palin returned to politics in August 2009, when she coined the infamous term "death panel" in a Facebook post saying, "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' ..." While the claim was named Politifact's Lie of the Year, the phrase would clearly cause the Obama administration headaches, so Republicans dug in. 

In March 2010, Palin and her family starred in the TLC reality show, "Sarah Palin's Alaska." The eight-episode series followed the Palins around Alaska, and was produced by Mark Burnett, known for creating Donald Trump's reality series, "The Apprentice." 

At the same time, Palin hosted "Real American Stories" on Fox News, where she was a political analyst. The special was mired in controversy when two people who appeared on it, LL Cool J and Toby Keith, said they never agreed to be on the show. LL Cool J complained on X (then Twitter), "Fox lifted an old interview I gave in 2008 to someone else & are misrepresenting to the public in order to promote Sarah Palins Show. WOW." Toby Keith released a statement to Hitflix (via HuffPost) stating, "I have no idea what interview it's taken from. They're promoting this like it's a brand new interview."

The Tea Party was a conservative movement that grew out of Ron Paul's presidential campaign to become a thorn in the side of the Obama administration. It held its first convention in 2010, with Sarah Palin taking part as the keynote speaker. Palin used her place in the growing movement to endorse a number of Republican women running for office, including former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. At a gathering of the Susan B. Anthony List, a conservative PAC, Palin once again showed her ability to turn a phrase when she said during her speech, "The mama grizzlies, they rise up."

The majority of candidates Palin endorsed, including Christine O'Donnell, who won her primary in an upset, won on election night, making Palin a major player in the Tea Party. However, it hurt her standing with the GOP, and political commentator Charles Krauthammer called Palin's endorsements "reckless and irresponsible" in a Washington Post op-ed. In November 2010, following the successes of the candidates she endorsed, Sarah Palin announced her intention to run in the 2012 presidential election. She said, "I'm engaged in the internal deliberations candidly, and having that discussion with my family, because my family is the most important consideration here" (via Politico).

During the 2010 midterms, Sarah Palin shared on Facebook a map showing which Democrat politicians her action committee was focused on. The map featured crosshairs over the states of each candidate, including Gabby Giffords' Arizona. Palin endorsed Giffords' opponent, Jesse Kelly, saying, "We've diagnosed the problem. Help us prescribe the solution" (via Daily Wildcat). 

Kelly lost his race to Giffords in November 2010, but tragedy struck in January 2011 when a gunman attempted to kill Gabby Giffords, shooting her in the head. Giffords miraculously survived the attack, though six other attendees of the event weren't as lucky. Shortly afterward, attention turned to Palin's crosshairs map. Representatives for SarahPAC were quick to deny any resemblance to gun sights, but ABC News pointed out that when the crosshairs map was first revealed, Palin responded to controversy surrounding it with, "Don't retreat, reload."

Palin defended herself but only made things worse when, per NPR, she described claims against her using the antisemitic term "blood libel". Giffords was the first Jewish politician to represent Arizona in Congress, making use of the term all the worse. Palin pushed forward, starring in "The Undefeated", a documentary about her life. It received a 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes, giving it a worse score than the brutally reviewed Melania Trump documentary. The fallout from the Giffords shooting and Palin's response hung over the one-time GOP darling, and in October of 2011, Palin announced that she would not run for president.

Sarah Palin attempted a comeback in 2013 by taking part in rallies during the government shutdown. Her plans hit a snag in 2014, when her family was involved in a fight at a house party. Per The Guardian, an "angry and intoxicated" Track Palin told officers that a friend was sucker punched. He "took off his shirt to fight" and then the whole family was involved — including Sarah Palin, who yelled, "Do you know who I am!?" (per ABC).

This was the start of Track Palin's problems. He was arrested for allegedly punching his girlfriend in 2016, and in 2017 for assaulting his father, Todd. Track was ordered to join a rehabilitation program for veterans, but another domestic violence charge in 2018 disqualified him, and he was sentenced to a year in jail. That same year, John McCain died, and Sarah Palin was not allowed to attend the funeral (per BBC).

On September 6, 2019, eight days after celebrating their 31st wedding anniversary, Todd Palin filed for divorce, citing "incompatibility of temperament". Sarah Palin laid low, but reemerged on "The Masked Singer" in 2020, calling her appearance on the show a "walking middle finger to the haters" (via Entertainment Weekly). In 2022, Palin entered a special election to replace Congressman Don Young in Alaska. Palin lost the special election to Mary Peltola. She ran again in the general election that November, only to lose once more.

While losing two elections in a year must have been difficult, it wasn't the only hit Sarah Palin took. In 2017, she sued the New York Times over an editorial, "America's Lethal Politics," which claimed there was a direct link between her crosshairs map and the shooting of Gabby Giffords. The paper ran a retraction, but the lawsuit moved forward. In 2022, a jury found that Palin had not proven malice. But she found a shoulder to cry on: Sarah Palin and NHL star Ron Duguay were dating. She also found a new career on Cameo, where she'd earned $211,529 (per Business Insider). 

In 2024, Palin's case against the New York Times was reopened when, according to AP, her team found that errors by the judge — primarily the decision to dismiss the lawsuit while the jury was in deliberations, and the exclusion of evidence — may have tainted the outcome. The case was retried, and in April 2025, a second jury reached the same conclusion as the first.

While Palin is still hoping to keep her political future alive, it seems that politics is done with her. In an interview with NewsNation, she admitted that she couldn't get a ticket to the 2024 GOP convention. The longtime Donald Trump supporter had hoped to be a part of the President's second term, serving on the Department of Energy. But according to her, "There are some gatekeepers around that administration."