The ForumVolume 2, Issue 4 2004 Article 1Post-Election 2004The Presidential Election of 2004: TheFundamentals and the CampaignJames E. Campbell⇤⇤University at Bu↵alo, SUNY, jcampbel@bu↵alo.eduCopyrightc2004 by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writtenpermission of the publisher, bepress. The Forum is produced by The Berkeley ElectronicPress (bepress). http://www.bepress.com/forumThe Presidential Election of 2004: TheFundamentals and the Campaign⇤James E. CampbellAbstractThis article examines the 2004 presidential campaign by examining the trinity offundamentals that have historically a↵ected presidential elections and how they “playedout” in this year’s campaign. The three fundamentals are public opinion about the in-party and candidates before the campaign gets underway, the state of the pre-campaigneconomy, and incumbency (both personal and party-term incumbency). They are assessedfor elections since 1948 and in one case since 1868. The first two of these fundamentalsslightly favored President Bush and the third (an incumbent seeking a second party-term)strongly favored him. The analysis considers how the fundamentals interplayed with voterassessments of candidate qualities, issues, and ideology to lead to the closely fought Bushre-election. After all is said and done, after considering the impact of the war on terrorand in Iraq, the election turned out much as one would have expected based on candidates’ideological positions. The 2004 election added another case to the string of presidentiallosses by liberal northern Democrats since 1968.KEYWORDS: elections, presidency, political parties⇤James E. Campbell is a professor of political science at the University at Bu↵alo, SUNY.He is the author of three university press books on American elections including TheAmerican Campaign: U.S. Presidential Campaigns and the National Vote. He has alsopublished more than fifty articles and book chapters on various aspe cts of American poli-tics. In November, he was featured in the “My Seven” column of National Geographic.More than 122 million Americans voted in the 2004 presidential election, almost 17 million more than had cast ballots in the 2000 election.1 Of the approximately 121 million voting for one of the major party candidates, 51.3 percent voted for President George W. Bush and 48.7 voted for his Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry.2 President Bush carried 31 states and accumulated 286 electoral votes, making him only the 16th president in American history and only the 4th since 1960 to be elected to two terms in the White House. Republicans have now won seven of the last ten presidential elections. Although the 2004 election was not as close as many had anticipated in the closing weeks of the campaign nor as close as the election of 2000, it nevertheless ranks in the top tier of closely decided elections in American electoral history. Of the 35 presidential elections since 1868, the 2004 election is one of only nine in which winning presidential candidate received less than 51.5 percent of the two-party vote (Campbell 2000, 165). In terms of the electoral vote margin, the 2004 election ranks as the 4th closest since 1868. In the twentieth century, only Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 victory over Charles Evans Hughes and the Bush’s contentious victory in 2000 over Al Gore were decided by smaller electoral vote margins. Each of these three elections turned on the electoral votes of a single, closely decided state.3 The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the reasons why George W. Bush won his bid for re-election. The answer to the question of why the 2004 election turned out as it did must begin with the defining feature of recent American politics: its polarization. The electorate’s polarization set an important backdrop to the 2004 campaign. There are many reasons for this polarization. The first is the realignment that began in the late 1950s and culminated in the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994. As Carmines and Stimson (1989) demonstrated some time ago, the collapse of the racial issue into the traditional government activism issue set a domino effect in motion. The Democratic Party became more homogeneously liberal and the Republican Party became more homogeneously conservative. The realignment is most clearly evident in the evolution of our political geography in which Northeastern states have become solidly Democratic and the “Solid South” is now solidly Republican. This realignment set the parties near parity in party identification, adding further fuel to polarization. Among voters, there are now nearly as many self-identified Republicans as there are self-identified Democrats. Partisanship is resurgent (Bartels 2000; Campbell 2000, 216). Among voters in the 2000 election, there were nearly as many strong partisans as there had been in the 1950s, the golden-era of partisanship (Campbell 2000, 211). Adding to polarization in 2004 was the vivid memory of the 2000 election. Adherents to both parties thought that the other side had attempted to steal the election. Finally, the war in Iraq heightened polarization. As the war continued and casualties mounted, conflicting views about the war overshadowed the short-lived bipartisanship following Al Qaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001 and the international efforts to hunt down terrorists. Polarization now permeates our politics, including the bitterly fought election campaign of 2004. 1Campbell: The Presidential Election of 2004: The Fundamentals and the CampaProduced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2004The Fundamentals in 2004 This analysis of the 2004 election examines three of the fundamentals that have historically shaped campaigns and how public reactions to the candidates and the issues, in the context of these fundamentals, led to President Bush’s re-election. Experience with presidential forecasting models suggests three sets of pre-campaign fundamentals that are important to setting the context for presidential elections (Campbell 2000, 2005a). Using the analogy of a card