Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska from December 2006 until her resignation in July 2009, and was the Republican vice presidential nominee on John McCain’s ticket in 2008. She is relevant to this site chiefly for two things: her use of a personal Facebook page as a primary channel for national political argument, beginning in 2009; and her long-running defamation suit against The New York Times, which produced a substantial appellate record on the actual-malice standard. She also contested both of Alaska’s 2022 U.S. House elections, the first federal races run under the state’s ranked-choice system.

Alaska Offices and the 2008 Campaign

Palin was born Sarah Louise Heath on 11 February 1964 in Sandpoint, Idaho. She served on the Wasilla City Council from 1992 to 1996, as mayor of Wasilla from 1996 to 2002, and on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission from 2003 to 2004. She was elected governor on 7 November 2006 and held the office from 4 December 2006 until 26 July 2009, having announced on 3 July 2009 that she would step down.

John McCain named her his running mate on 29 August 2008, and she accepted the vice presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention on 3 September 2008. The Federal Election Commission’s official compilation of the certified returns records the result: Barack Obama received 69,498,516 popular votes (52.93%) and 365 electoral votes; McCain received 59,948,323 (45.65%) and 173. In the Second Circuit’s later phrasing, it was “undisputed” that Palin, “a former governor of Alaska and Republican candidate for Vice President in 2008, is a public figure.”

Facebook as a Direct Channel

Palin launched a political action committee, SarahPAC, on 27 January 2009. In March 2010 the committee circulated a digital graphic — a map superimposing crosshairs over twenty congressional districts held by Democrats, including that of Representative Gabrielle Giffords. The description of the graphic is the Second Circuit’s, taken from the trial exhibits in her later suit.

The clearest instance of her direct-to-audience method came on 7 August 2009, when she posted a statement on Facebook headed “Statement on the Current Health Care Debate.” Writing about the health-care bill then before the House, she said that “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’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.” The provision she was describing was an optional Medicare benefit in H.R. 3200 covering end-of-life counselling appointments. PolitiFact, which named “death panels” its inaugural Lie of the Year in December 2009, noted that the post returned her to national attention a month after her resignation announcement, and quoted a November 2009 interview in which she said the term “should not be taken literally” but that she would use it again.

The mechanism is the point for this site: a statement composed and published by the subject on a personal social-media page, with no interviewer and no intermediating outlet, entered the congressional debate directly and was then covered as news by everyone else.

Broadcast and Subscription Media

Palin was a Fox News contributor, in CNN’s summary, “off and on between 2010 and 2015.” NPR reported on 25 January 2013 that the network was not renewing her contract at that time. She delivered the keynote address at the first national Tea Party convention on 6 February 2010. Discovery Communications announced on 25 March 2010 that she would appear in an eight-part TLC series, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” On 27 July 2014 she launched the subscription-based Sarah Palin Channel online. She endorsed Donald Trump at an Iowa campaign stop on 19 January 2016.

The 2022 Alaska House Races

Palin ran twice in 2022 for Alaska’s single at-large seat in the U.S. House, vacated by the death of Representative Don Young. Both contests were the first federal elections run under Alaska’s new system of a “Top 4” primary and ranked-choice voting in the general election, and the FEC’s official compilation reports the ranked-choice rounds.

In the special general election of 16 August 2022, the first round was Mary S. Peltola 75,799 (40.19%), Palin 58,973 (31.27%) and Nick Begich 53,810 (28.53%); after Begich’s elimination the second and final round was Peltola 91,266 (51.48%) to Palin 86,026 (48.52%). In the regular general election of 8 November 2022, the first round was Peltola 128,755 (48.66%), Palin 68,330 (25.82%), Begich 62,505 (23.62%) and Chris Bye 4,999 (1.89%); the third and final round was Peltola 137,263 (54.96%) to Palin 112,471 (45.04%).

Palin v. The New York Times

On 14 June 2017 the Times editorial board published “America’s Lethal Politics,” comparing the 2011 shooting in which Jared Loughner killed six people and wounded Representative Giffords with the shooting that day at a congressional baseball practice in Virginia. The editorial as published asserted that in the Loughner case “the link to political incitement was clear,” referring to the SarahPAC crosshairs map. The Second Circuit later stated flatly that “a relationship between the crosshairs map and the Loughner shooting was never established.” The sentences at issue were added by opinion editor James Bennet during a heavy edit of a draft by Times writer Elizabeth Williamson; the draft he edited had linked the word “circulated” to a January 2011 ABC News article stating that no connection had been made between the map and the shooting.

After public criticism the Times revised the passage and published two corrections. The first, on 15 June 2017, read: “An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established.” The second, the next day, clarified that the map had put crosshairs over districts rather than over photographs of the representatives.

Palin filed suit against the Times and Bennet in the Southern District of New York on 27 June 2017. The litigation has run through two trials and two appeals:

• 2017. Judge Jed S. Rakoff held an evidentiary hearing with Bennet as the sole witness and dismissed the complaint under Rule 12(b)(6) for failure to plead actual malice.
• 2019. The Second Circuit reversed and reinstated the complaint on 6 August 2019, in an opinion amended on 15 October 2019.
• 2022. The case was tried to a jury. While the jury was deliberating, Rakoff dismissed the case under Rule 50; the jury was nonetheless allowed to return a verdict, and found the Times and Bennet not liable.
• 2024. On 28 August 2024 the Second Circuit vacated both the Rule 50 judgment and the verdict and remanded for a new trial, holding that the Rule 50 ruling had made credibility determinations reserved to the jury, and that the exclusion of evidence, an inaccurate jury instruction, an erroneous answer to a mid-deliberation jury question, and jurors learning of the Rule 50 ruling during deliberations together impugned the verdict’s reliability. The mandate issued on 1 November 2024.
• 2025. The retrial ended on 22 April 2025. The docket minute entry records that the jury retired at 1:45 p.m. and returned a verdict for the defendants at 3:40 p.m. the same afternoon. Judgment dismissing the complaint was entered on 28 April 2025. Rakoff denied Palin’s post-trial motions for a new trial and for judgment as a matter of law on 15 December 2025.
• Pending. Palin filed a notice of appeal on 28 May 2025; the Second Circuit appeal, No. 25-1375, remained open at the time of this audit. Through the latest docket entries available here — 16 April 2026 — it had not been briefed on the merits, having been referred to the court’s mediation programme, with the parties filing successive stipulations withdrawing the appeal without prejudice to reinstatement.

The 2024 opinion is the substantive one: it is now cited in the Second Circuit for the limits on a trial judge’s power to take a defamation case from a jury. Neither jury has found the Times liable, and no court has found that the editorial was published with actual malice.

What Is Not Established Here

The page previously described Palin only as someone who “became a prominent figure in media and political commentary.” That is an assessment rather than a fact, and it has been replaced with dated, sourced employment and publication facts.

Several things were checked and could not be sourced to this project’s standard, so they are not asserted here. Alaska’s own election and archive sites — elections.alaska.gov, gov.alaska.gov and archives.alaska.gov — block automated clients, and the Wayback Machine returned HTTP 429 to every request throughout this audit, so no primary state record of the 2006 gubernatorial returns or of the exact dates of her term could be obtained. The office dates given above, and the dates for the Wasilla council and mayoralty, the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the Fox News engagement, the TLC series and the Sarah Palin Channel, rest on CNN’s dated chronology rather than on a primary record; they should be upgraded when a state or first-party source becomes reachable.

Her 7 August 2009 Facebook post is quoted here from PolitiFact’s contemporaneous reproduction of it, not from the post itself: Facebook note pages from 2009 are only reachable through the Wayback Machine, which was unavailable. The dollar value of her Fox News contract, the reason either Fox engagement ended, viewership or subscriber figures for the TLC series or the Sarah Palin Channel, and any follower count for her social accounts are all omitted for want of a source. So is any characterisation of her politics or of her influence on the Tea Party movement; this page states what she held, said, published and litigated, and leaves interpretation to the reader.