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During the presidential debate Saturday Night Live created characters pretending to be Barak Obama, John McCain and Sarah Palin. These characters drew in great ratings for the tv show going up 50% before Sarah Palin made her first actual appearance on the show. Saturday Night Live even created a webpage devoted to the SNL 2008 elections which shows the delegate count, ads, voting, videos, games a timeline a generator to "Determine who's your SNL Candidate" and various other activites. Not only did these characters draw great attention but Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, John McCain decided to appear on the show as well.

This was not the first time government officials have appeared in skits on SNL. Some other performers including Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Gov. Huckabee as well as many others.

Voters seemed to have differing opinions on how they viewed the candidates for performing skits on SNL. Though everyone seemed to agree that Tina Fey’s success. A newspaper reported that this helped Tina Fey become a household name and helped aid her success as an actress.

One side people took shared the opinion that the candidates appearing on SNL “showed that they were lighthearted and human” Dotan Schips stated.  Rachel Ciotoli explained, “I think that it makes them more relatable to a younger audience and I'm sure that's one of the reasons that many young voters were seen at the polls this year.  If you look at a candidate like Bill Clinton, he chose to go on the Arsieno Hall show and that endeared him to younger voters”.

Alyssa Irla replied “while it did make them more personable, we already know they are actually people and have lives separate from their political career. However, I think that they should have just let SNL go ahead and make fun of them because to me it did seem like they weren't taking the issues seriously when they were on the show and all because they would laugh about serious things that this country needs to take care of. It’s one thing for actors to do it, but the people who are attempting to run our country should be careful what they make fun of I think.

All the voters did state that the end result of viewing the SNL skits did not make any changes to their original chose of candidate to vote for.

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