So there's this country with two major political parties. This country had a candidate who barely won a hotly contested 2000 Presidential election, where there was a third party spoiler that prevented the party that had held the presidency from winning. This new President then became increasingly unpopular with hints of corruption in his party (I'll call this Party A from now on), but still managed to win re-election in 2004. Massive corruption and scandal then dogged his party. The most-watched TV news station in the country openly shills for Party A, and gets away with saying outright lies about the other party, which is represented by the color blue (which I'll call Party B from now on). People in Party B want him investigated for crimes and crony capitalism against the country.
Then in 2008, a charismatic figure emerged as the new opposition candidate for Party B, campaigning on a platform of hope and change. He's a family man who's married with two daughters. He graduated from Harvard Law School, and his wife has a law degree as well. After a bad experience in politics, he went back to academia, but a short while later, took on the incumbent for a local seat, and won.
Because of term limits, the increasingly unpopular President from Party A couldn't run for a third term anyway. The person who eventually emerged from Party A's primary as the new candidate said "[our country's] future will be in danger" if the candidate from Party B was elected. Others in his party went further, claiming the country would be destroyed should Party B win the presidency. The candidate from Party B wasn't born on the mainland, either, and he was attacked by certain people from Party A who claimed he lied about where he was really born. These people, which include some elected officials from Party A, claimed he was ineligible to be President, and kept demanding to see his birth certificate. Some of them outright questioned his loyalty to his country, and whether he was perhaps working for another country in secret. The Party B candidate was also criticized from the left by the country's Green Party, which said he wasn't good enough on environmental issues.
But the opposition candidate from Party B ended up winning the 2008 election pretty easily, turning many districts blue, and gaining a huge majority in the legislative branch at the same time. Still, things didn't go as well as he had hoped, as the global economic crisis didn't spare his country either. Unemployment rates rose, companies shut down, the stock market crashed, and citizens worried the country might fall into default.
So this new President, just having been inaugurated a few months earlier, pushed through a big stimulus package that was a mixture of infrastructure projects, incentives for small businesses, and tax cuts. However, the economy didn't pick up as quickly as they would've liked, and he and his party were blamed for it. In the middle of his presidency, a disaster struck the country, to which the President was heavily criticized for not responding faster and with more urgency to it. News outlets, especially the one shilling for Party A, called it "his Hurricane Katrina". This also saw his approval rating sink some more. In the next legislative elections, his party lost dozens of seats, as well as their majority.
As for the President, running for re-election in 2012, he was met with the same attacks of how his re-election would cause the country to be destroyed from outside forces seeking to take them over. His eventual 2012 opponent from Party A came from the top 1% of the country, from one of the wealthier families. Also an Ivy League graduate, this candidate pushed a more belligerent foreign policy against other countries, while the President continued to stress the need for cooperation with other countries. Party A's candidate also practices a religion that is shared by less than 5% of the country's population, and which in certain circles is not looked upon very highly.
Oh yeah, there's also this other politician from Party B who's run for President before. He was also the Vice Presidential candidate for Party B when they lost the election in another year. After losing his own party's primary, he actually split off and formed his own political party. While he started off as a pretty well-respected figure, by 2012, he now just mostly pisses off supporters of Party B, as he tries his best to poke a stick in the President's eye on issue after issue.
So... what country am I talking about?
And no, I'm not talking about the United States.
And no, this is not some fictional country from a book or movie or TV show.
1:03 PM PT: And sewaneepat got the answer very quickly. :-)