Did John Kerry really blow it in 2004?

[Dan the Roman]

I honestly feel that 2004 was what a French-style runoff in January of 2001 between Gore and Bush would have produced. Something like a 51.2-48.8% Bush victory.

There is no period of American history where more words were wasted on trends that did not exist and developments that did not matter. The reason things appeared significant is that everyone exaggerated the impact of previous data. Democrats misread coming off on the wrong side of a coin-toss that had already come down almost unbelievably in their favor in 2000(look at the Senate races and Gore winning Iowa, Oregon, New Mexico, the polls etc) and rather than concluding that they were lucky but not lucky enough, they concluded they had been cheated of some sort of clear popular mandate. That then led them to over-read 9/11 and especially the 2002 results, which distorted analysis of 2004.

Gore did not do as well in 2000 as everyone decided to pretend post-Florida. That in turn meant that Bush was never as strong as both Republicans and Democrats, for their own separate reasons, pretended before 2004. Kerry was not as weak as was remembered after 2004.

Both elections were fairly decent measures of generic Democrat versus generic Republican circa those years. That measure produced results close enough that without an incumbent, the outcome could be determined by the weather or ballot design in 2000, and in 2004 by the increased media and narrative resources of incumbency.