The counterexample here is Obama. Aside from his skin color, he's about as moderate and unexciting as you can get. My takeaway from the "change" bit was "Hey, I'm not associated in any way with GWB; hell, I don't look anything like him. and I sound reasonable and educated" Which, of course, after 8 years of GWB, sounded absolutely amazing. Nearly every vote for Obama in 2008 was actually a vote against GWB. My take is that the democrats could have run a literal empty suit and it would have won by a landslide.

You remember when they gave Obama the peace prize for not being GWB? The whole world was in love with him, not for what he was or what he did, but for who he wasn't.

Now, if I'm right, I think that if the republicans, say, ran Romney instead of McCain in 2008? they would have had a much better chance; not because McCain is fundamentally incompetent or unreasonable or anything like that, but because he smells a lot more like GWB than Romney does. I mean, from what I read, McCain is an actual war hero, and was heroic in ways that even a pacifist would admire, at great personal cost, and it's not right to compare him to a chicken hawk like GWB, but the truth of the matter is that, in the minds of most voters, the two are related.

Sure, I think Romney probably still would have lost, just because he was a republican and so was GWB, but he would have had a better shot at it than McCain did.

There was a lot of talk about disappointment with Obama, with big expectations that he never delivered on... but I think that was mostly made-up by his enemies. I mean, he wasn't amazing or anything, except compared to his predecessor, but he did a fine job of sounding reasonable and educated. He wasn't perfect, but he didn't massively screw anything up.

I think the fact that Obama won in 2012 supports my argument that most people see him as basically competent. Not bad. A reasonable moderate who did a moderately reasonable job.

Of course, you could also make a different argument about 2012 (and about the counterfactual run in 2008) Romney is not the sort that the republican base would get excited about. He's as centrist as Obama is. I can see myself voting for someone like Romney. (I'd take Obama over Romney, sure, but we could do worse than Romney as President. A lot worse.) And he's a Mormon... a religion that many Christians don't consider to be christian at all. You can make a very good argument, using your theory, that Romney lost because the GOP base wasn't excited and just stayed home.