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538 members of the Electoral College 270 electoral votes needed to win | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Turnout | 60.1%[1] ![]() | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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![]() Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Bush/Cheney and blue denotes those won by Kerry/Edwards. Numbers indicate electoral votes cast by each state and the District of Columbia. Faithless elector: John Edwards 1 (MN) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The 2004 United States presidential election was the 55th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 2, 2004. The Republican ticket of incumbent President George W. Bush and his running mate incumbent Vice President Dick Cheney were re-elected to a second term. They narrowly defeated the Democratic ticket of John Kerry, a United States senator from Massachusetts and his running mate John Edwards, a United States senator from North Carolina.
Bush and Cheney were renominated by their party with no difficulty. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean emerged as the early front-runner in the 2004 Democratic Party presidential primaries, but Kerry won the first set of primaries in January and clinched his party's nomination in March after a series of primary victories. Kerry chose Edwards, who was the runner-up in the primaries, to be his running mate.
Foreign policy was the dominant theme throughout the election campaign, particularly Bush's handling of the war on terror and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Bush presented himself as a decisive leader and attacked Kerry as a "flip-flopper". Kerry criticized Bush's conduct of the Iraq War, despite having voted for it himself. Domestic issues were debated as well, including the economy and jobs, health care, abortion, same-sex marriage and embryonic stem cell research.
Bush won by a narrow margin of 35 electoral votes and took 50.7% of the popular vote. Bush swept the South and the Mountain States and took the crucial swing states of Ohio, Iowa, and New Mexico, the latter two flipping Republican. Although Kerry flipped New Hampshire, Bush won both more electoral votes and states than in 2000. Ohio was the tipping-point state, and was considered to be the state that allowed Bush to win re-election. Some aspects of the election process were subject to controversy, but not to the degree seen in the 2000 presidential election. Bush won Florida by a five-percent margin, a significant improvement over his razor-thin victory margin in the state 4 years earlier which led to a legal challenge in Bush v. Gore. As of 2020, this is the most recent presidential election in which the Republican candidate won Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, or Virginia. This is also the most recent presidential election in which the Republican nominee won the popular vote and the only presidential election since 1984 in which the incumbent Republican president won re-election. At the time, Bush also received the most popular votes in history, a record which would be broken in the 2008 presidential election. Bush also became the only incumbent president to win re-election after previously losing the popular vote.
Since the death of 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman in 2024, this is the earliest presidential election in which all major-party candidates for president and vice president are still alive. This is the most recent presidential election in which neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump were on the ballot.
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