The Forum Volume 2 Issue 4 2004 Article 1 Post Election 2004 The Presidential Election of 2004 The Fundamentals and the Campaign James E Campbell University at Bu alo SUNY jcampbel bu alo edu Copyright c 2004 by the authors All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical photocopying recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher bepress The Forum is produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press bepress http www bepress com forum The Presidential Election of 2004 The Fundamentals and the Campaign James E Campbell Abstract This article examines the 2004 presidential campaign by examining the trinity of fundamentals that have historically a ected presidential elections and how they played out in this year s campaign The three fundamentals are public opinion about the inparty and candidates before the campaign gets underway the state of the pre campaign economy and incumbency both personal and party term incumbency They are assessed for elections since 1948 and in one case since 1868 The first two of these fundamentals slightly favored President Bush and the third an incumbent seeking a second party term strongly favored him The analysis considers how the fundamentals interplayed with voter assessments of candidate qualities issues and ideology to lead to the closely fought Bush re election After all is said and done after considering the impact of the war on terror and 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 presidential losses 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 The American Campaign U S Presidential Campaigns and the National Vote He has also published more than fifty articles and book chapters on various aspects of American politics In November he was featured in the My Seven column of National Geographic Campbell The Presidential Election of 2004 The Fundamentals and the Campa 1 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 goldenera 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 Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press 2004 2 The fundamentals are the cards dealt to the candidates The candidates we have the stronger hand are those highly regarded by the public at the outset The Forum Vol 2 2004 No 4 Article 1 The 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 game the fundamentals are the cards dealt to the candidates In this game each side knows what cards the other holds so while it is