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John McCain ran a mistake-prone and at times erratic campaign for the White House. He rolled the dice on the unknown and untested Sarah Palin as his running mate. He never articulated a clear message to voters about his candidacy.

But the emerging postmortem consensus of political experts is that the Arizona Republican really didn’t have a prayer of winning no matter what he did.

McCain was anchored to the historically unpopular outgoing GOP President Bush and faced a hostile electorate looking for a new direction. Add to that the worst financial crisis in generations and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And his Democratic opponent, President-elect Barack Obama, is a true American political phenomenon, one of the most gifted orators of his time.

“Everything was going to go the wrong way for the Republicans, in general, because of the negatives that President Bush had. When you combine the war, the economy, the gas prices - it’s a hell of a thing,” said Alberto Gutier, a longtime Phoenix Republican activist and diehard McCain supporter.

Obama defeated McCain on Tuesday in an Electoral College landslide. Obama won 52 percent of the popular vote to McCain’s 46 percent.

“Look, he didn’t run the best campaign that we’ve ever seen, but no Republican could have won this year,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “You can’t win with conditions this bad for the incumbent party. And that’s McCain’s consolation: He did reasonably well under extremely difficult conditions. It was never meant to be.”