Sarah Louise Palin ( ( listen); nee Heath; born February 11, 1964) is an American politician, commentator, and author who served as the ninth Governor of Alaska from 2006 until her resignation in 2009. As the Republican Party nominee for Vice President of the United States in the 2008 election alongside presidential nominee, Arizona Senator John McCain, she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major political party and the first Republican woman selected as a vice presidential candidate. Her book Going Rogue has sold more than two million copies. She was elected to the Wasilla city council in 1992 and became mayor of Wasilla in 1996.

In 2002, Palin ran for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor, coming in second to Loren Leman in a five-way Republican primary. Following her defeat, she campaigned throughout the state for the nominated Republican governor-lieutenant governor ticket of Frank Murkowski and Leman. Murkowski and Leman won and Murkowski resigned from his long-held U.S. Senate seat in December 2002 to assume the governorship. Palin was said to be on the "short list" of possible appointees to Murkowski's U.S. Senate seat, but Murkowski ultimately appointed his daughter, State Representative Lisa Murkowski, as his successor in the Senate. Governor Murkowski offered other jobs to Palin, and in February 2003 she accepted an appointment to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which oversees Alaska's oil and gas fields for safety and efficiency. While she had little background in the area, she said she wanted to learn more about the oil industry and was named chair of the commission and ethics supervisor. By November 2003 she was filing nonpublic ethics complaints with the state attorney general and the governor against a fellow commission member, Randy Ruedrich, a former petroleum engineer and at the time the chair of the state Republican Party. He was forced to resign in November 2003. Palin resigned in January 2004 and put her protests against Ruedrich's "lack of ethics" into the public arena by filing a public complaint against Ruedrich, who was then fined $12,000. She joined with Democratic legislator Eric Croft in complaining that Gregg Renkes, then the attorney general of Alaska, had a financial conflict of interest in negotiating a coal exporting trade agreement. Renkes also resigned his post. From 2003 to June 2005, Palin served as one of three directors of "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.," a 527 group designed to provide political training for Republican women in Alaska. In 2004, Palin told the Anchorage Daily News that she had decided not to run for the U.S. Senate that year against the Republican incumbent, Lisa Murkowski, because her teenage son opposed it. Palin said, "How could I be the team mom if I was a U.S. Senator?"

Did she win?
Murkowski and Leman won and Murkowski resigned from his long-held U.S.