Steve Rosenbaum in the Huffington Post beleives McCain will not take the nomination in August and the Republicans will be forced to find a substitute. Various comments after the article agree and disagree with Rosenbaum. One of the more interesting of those comments was this:

"Many activists in the GOP, including myself, *want* McCain to lose, because the party has become this war-hawk, dominionist, big government, Straussian nightmare and we want it back. The Neo-cons, in other words, crashed the family car and now we can't afford milk. These party insiders need to be driven out into the frigid late November cold, and the only way we can see that happening is a major, humiliating defeat in the fall. And yes, Obama will be blamed for the economic mess--but by these same discredited neocons, and not by the real fiscal conservative activists. This mess was set up by Greenspan and inherited by Bernanke, and the Federal Reserve deserves all of the credit there. Who knows? Maybe Obama would have the guts to take on the Fed. Though a wide-open convention would stir things up and maybe give us a better candidate, I seriously doubt it will happen. I'm planning to sit this election out and let Obama win, for all the reasons above."

Here's the link to the article.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-rosenbaum/when-mccain-drops-out_b_107236.html