The Ghost of 2004: How a Largely-Forgotten Presidential Campaign threatens to Repeat Itself

By Matt McCaw

I remember where I was the night of November 2nd, 2004. Sitting on the floor of my then-girlfriend’s apartment near Ohio State University, we waited for the presidential election returns to come in on, wait for it, kids, the television. I remember being drunk on the confidence that a small band of 20-somethings luckily placed in America’s most important swing state had indeed changed the world. I’d been both a volunteer and paid employee in John Kerry’s presidential campaign, and I remember, as we worked feverishly until the clock struck seven that night, naively concluding that you could “just feel” that we’d won. The news from CNN told a very different story. George H.W. Bush narrowly won a second term in what has since faded into history as a fairly lackluster political event.

I was crushed. It didn’t make sense that I could have worked that hard for that long for something that yielded nothing. Like I said, I was 25. I began plans to join the Peace Corps and then live abroad in an effort to distance myself from my benighted homeland. In the weeks that followed, pundits and analysts made their conclusions. Sitting presidents in war-time are rarely unseated. The Democratic Party had run a three-term senator, generally considered a dead-end on the road to the Presidency. The economy had shown modest growth. However, another factor began to enter the discussion. The opposition had shown a baffling lack of interest in courting the middle-ground where American elections are won. Whatever efforts strategists and the DNC made to run a conventional campaign were always accompanied by a level of vitriol and extremism from a class of voters that seemed new to the American political landscape. Left-leaning magazines struck far below what had been the political belt. Political rallies, long the domains of balloons and fake smiles, were suddenly convulsed with rage and fringe political ideas. I remember the audience response from a screening of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 that should’ve struck me as downright Orwellian. And the internet was beginning to sprout the grassy chutes of vitriol that now define our national conversation. Undecided voters had turned away from this deeply antagonistic message and given the president four more years.

Fast forward to now. The world is a very different place than it was in 2004. George H.W. Bush had presided over a disastrous foreign war that perhaps counts as the single worst decision in presidential history. His reelection campaign had been a well-funded machine run by life-long political strategists. America’s ambitions stretched the globe, and our two great parties were the unquestioned masters of the universe. Fears of further wars in Iran or the Korean peninsula fueled opposition to the president’s bid for a second-term and leant the Kerry campaign a world-shaking urgency. By contrast, foreign nations threaten to delegitimize our elections, and America’s global ambitions are largely forgotten. Domestic issues dominate what remains of our national conversation, and an imperial president who could move our armies to Baghdad has been replaced by a petty executive without the capacity to do much outside of the digital world.

Nonetheless, a curious repeat of 2004 is beginning to unfold. An angry opposition, supremely confident in its sheer ‘rightness’, has unleashed a volley of angry rhetoric that threatens to make past left-leaning oppositions look like a city council referendum. A quick sampling of my own Facebook feed contains casual threats of violence against the opposition, even one damning rally attendees to hell; defense of police abolition; and broad and divisive indictments of racism and lawlessness. One friend who I’ve long-considered an intellectual peer recently posted a meme championing assassination, an idea once beyond the pale in American public life. I know these are intelligent people, and I am a firm supporter in our shared goal of replacing the president. I can hear their defenses of their ideas just as clearly as I can hear the dreams of my fellow campaign workers in 2004, and they might be onto something. But elections are strategic games, and this playbook has failed again and again. An undecided voter going to the polls in November could be forgiven for equating the Biden campaign with the elimination of law enforcement. A voter in my old precinct in Columbus, Ohio, could easily associate the Democratic Party with renaming Ohio’s capital city. And little of what I see day-to-day seems likely to entice Caucasian male voters, who possess the inconvenient role of kingmakers in American politics.

These are the signs of the same hubris that doomed the opposition sixteen years ago. A quick look at the president’s intellectual output via twitter should be enough to convince even the most conservative oddsmaker that November is a done deal, but consider President Trump’s approval rating today: a healthy 39%. 9 points below George H.W. Bush’s the same week of his first term. But the opposition has plenty of time to make up the deficit.