The 2004 United States presidential election was the 55th quadrennial presidential election. Republican President George W. Bush and his running mate Vice President Dick Cheney were elected to a second term. The Democratic ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards was defeated by Bush and Cheney. Bush won by a narrow margin of 35 electoral votes and took 50. 7% of the popular vote.
About 2004 United States presidential election in brief
The 2004 United States presidential election was the 55th quadrennial presidential election. The incumbent Republican President George W. Bush and his running mate Vice President Dick Cheney were elected to a second term. The Democratic ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards was defeated by Bush and Cheney. Bush won by a narrow margin of 35 electoral votes and took 50. 7% of the popular vote. Bush served until 2009 and was succeeded by Democrat Barack Obama, whereas Kerry continued to serve in the Senate and later became Secretary of State during Obama’s second term and later served in the House of Representatives. This is the last presidential election where an incumbent president increased their electoral vote count from their previous election as well as the last time the Republican nominee won thepopular vote. This also remains the most recent election when the Republican candidate would be re-elected as President of the United States. It also marks the final time to date that a Republican presidential nominee has won the states of Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and Virginia. At the time Bush’s popular vote total was the most votes ever received by a presidential candidate, a total that has since been surpassed 6 times in the last 4 presidential elections. Bush’s popularity had soared early in his first term after the September 11, 2001 attacks, but his popularity declined between 2001 and 2004. Bush presented himself as a decisive leader and attacked Kerry as a \”flip-flopper\”, while Kerry criticized Bush’s conduct of the Iraq War. Some aspects of the election process were subject to controversy, but not to the degree seen in the 2000 presidential election, unlike his razor-thin margin of victory there in 2000 that led to a legal challenge in Bush v.
Gore. The Bush administration argued the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq gave the people of Iraq an antagonist rather than gaining voters through ideas or policy. Among the reasons stated were that Saddam’s regime had tried to acquire nuclear material and had not properly accounted for it. The assertion about WMD was hotly debated by the Bush administration, but other major powers remained unconvinced that Iraq was a threat and refused to allow passage of a resolution in the UN Security Council to authorize the use of force in Iraq, and the failure to account for them for them would violate the UN’s sanctions. The United States entered Afghanistan, which had been sheltering Osama bin Laden, suspected mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, in December 2001. By December, the Taliban had been removed, although a long and ongoing reconstruction would follow. Within a month, the forces of a coalition led by the U.S. entered Afghanistan and then turned its attention to Iraq, where Bush argued that Saddam Hussein had given the people an enemy rather than a common enemy. This was the first and only time that the nominee of a major party won a presidential election without winning any electoral votes from the Northeast. Bush also became the only incumbent president to win reelection after losing the popularVote in the previous election. All others lost, most recently Donald Trump in 2020.
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