The secret to McCain's enduring popularity is known as psychology of previous investment.

Have you ever heard of a gambler who upon losing the first 10,000 dollars digs his hole deeper by losing his house, car and family heirlooms in one night at the casino? What propelled him to risk ever grater amounts when the night clearly wasn't going his way?

Ever witnessed a stubborn boss who babysat one favorite area of his and destroyed the rest of the company in the process? What makes that businessman ruin the company by pursuing an unprofitable pet project to the detriment of profitable product lines?

There is a very powerful psychological drive which makes us intuit that just because we invested a lot of time, money, effort or emotion into something then that something must have been worth quite a bit. Otherwise we wouldn't have invested all of those resources, right?

Wrong.

It is very common for people to pursue worthless ideas, spend time on meaningless activities and place their loyalties in the wrong people. Once they have made the investment they intuitively rationalize the value of what they invested in. The higher the amount of investment the stronger the bond. It was mentioned on the news that during the dotcom crash of 2000 some CEO's had to receive counseling in order to let go of their inane ideas. A team was formed that called themselves dotcom gravediggers and their staff consisted of accountants, lawyers but also psychologists and even an ex-FBI hijack/hostage negotiator.

In politics, just like in other areas of our lives a lot of us have very strong emotional investment in the candidacy of a particular figure. The better known the candidate and the longer the bond the more difficult it is to break it. The amount of prior "investment" in the candidate elevates that candidate in the eyes of the beholder.

John McCain has been acting like a clown for most of his campaign and his support is melting away but not crashing in a way that most of us would expect or hope for. In order to achieve that two things must happen. First, the emotional attachment to McCain must be broken and second people who felt invested in his candidacy must get the sense it is OK to let go. This realization can take various forms but in most people it invokes the sense of loss that is described in the famous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Those stages don't always occur in the same order for all people and some people skip certain phases. But on the whole they will follow the pattern of proceeding from denial ("John is just having a Senior moment, how cute!") to anger ("I've had enough of those lies about our honorable Prisoner of War that the liberul media is feeding us") to bargaining ("his economic muscle is not there but at least his national security credentials are way up there!") to depression ("I'm not voting for anybody this year, there is nobody worth voting for") and finally acceptance ("hey maybe that whippersnapper from Chicago would make a good president after all!").

Now I don't know where most of the Republican voters' minds are along this process but my hunch is that they are past denial and possibly past the anger stage but probably still bargaining. If McCain keeps running his campaign the way he has been for the past few weeks he is going to leave them few if any mental bargaining chips. Only when they have reached the depression stage are they actually able to shut the door on the idea of McCain presidency and move forward towards acceptance. That's when they become open to being convinced of the merit of the other candidate but not before.

This is exactly why a single gaffe or a single boneheaded move will not cause McCain to lose 20% of his base overnight. Even if he gets caught in bed filming an leather fetish porno with Sarah Palin. Now, don't get me wrong. His gaffes help and his erratic behavior is giving many of his supporters a long pause. But it will take a fair amount of time before you really see the shift build up in our direction purely because the human mind is capable of some of the most irrational behavior when the fallacy of previous investment kicks in. Expect those people to make many irrational arguments to support John McCain and don't dismiss them out of hand. Realize that those people are psychologically in a peculiar place and they are not going to accept your rational arguments as soon as you rattle them off. They have five stages of grief to go through.