Tactics, Turnout, and Timing in the Elections of 2004

Abstract

At 5 p.m. on election day, 2 November 2004, the John Zogby Polling Organization posted on its web site a projection for the outcome of the fiercely contested presidential contest: Massachusetts Democratic Senator John Kerry would win the presidency with 311 electoral votes. Zogby was wrong. President George W. Bush won re-election with 286 electoral votes to 252 for Kerry, the slimmest electoral margin for any incumbent president since Woodrow Wilson. As the spate of books on the election indicates, partisans, pundits, and professors are still pondering how he did it— and what the win means for the future of American politics. For Republicans the election of 2004 was a validation and a vindication. Voters, they claimed, had endorsed President Bush’s war on terrorism, his preemptive invasion of Iraq, his tax cuts, and his vigorous social conservatism. In addition, in a sense, they had ratified the Supreme Court decision settling the election of 2000, in which Al Gore had garnered 540,000 more popular votes than Bush. For uber-strategist Karl Rove, even more was at stake. Early in his career, Rove took as his role model Marcus Hanna, the businessman-cumcampaign manager behind William McKinley’s ascension to the Oval Office in 1896—an election that ushered in a 36 year period of Republican dominance in national politics. With a (two-term) Bush in the hand, Rove set his sights on reformulating American politics by breaking the two-party deadlock that has prevailed for the last 30 years to create a new, enduring Republican majority. Some say the dream is about to be realized. In The Elections of 2004 (2005), Michael Nelson, for example, concludes that a “new Republican majority” (3) has consolidated control of Congress, a majority of governorships and state legislatures, as well as a plurality of voters. Bush’s re-election was no “lonely