He swept the South and the Mountain States and took the crucial swing states of Ohio, Iowa, and New Mexico, the latter two being flipped Republican. The Iraq issue gave Bush an antagonist to present to the people, (similar but different than that of 2001). Presidential popular votes by county. The following table records the official vote tallies for each state as reported by the official Federal Election Commission report. James Harris replaced Calero on certain other states' ballots. The Bush administration then turned its attention to Iraq, and argued the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq had become urgent. They were conducted in an environment that reflects a long-standing democratic tradition, including institutions governed by the rule of law, free and generally professional media, and a civil society intensively engaged in the election process. Some older party-affiliation maps use the opposite color-coding for historical reasons. International election observers were barred from the polls in Ohio. The morning after the election, the major candidates were neck and neck. Bush's approval rating in May was at 66%, according to a CNN–USA Today–Gallup poll. It should not be a surprise that the Republicans are willing to do things that are unethical to manipulate elections. Because of the Act's restrictions on candidates' and parties' fundraising, a large number of so-called 527 groups emerged. Cartogram in which each square represents one electoral vote. All ten electors in the state cast ballots for John Edwards for vice president (John Edwards's name was spelled correctly on all ballots for vice president). Representatives from the Democratic Party had sent a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan asking for the UN to monitor the elections. He was shouting over the cheers of his enthusiastic audience, but the crowd noise was being filtered out by his unidirectional microphone, leaving only his full-throated exhortations audible to the television viewers. Electoral College in 2004 than in 2000, since the number of electors allotted to each state is equal to the sum of the number of Senators and Representatives from that state. This law was not well known or widely publicized at the beginning of the Democratic primary season, which led to some early misperception of Howard Dean, who was the first candidate to buy television advertising in this election cycle. [5] Iraq permitted UN weapon inspectors in November 2002, who were continuing their work to assess the WMD claim when the Bush administration decided to proceed with war without UN authorization and told the inspectors to leave the country. On January 27, Kerry triumphed again, winning the New Hampshire primary. Therefore, the outcome of the election hinged solely on the result in Ohio, regardless of the final totals elsewhere. His campaign focused on themes of leadership and patriotism; early campaign advertisements relied heavily on biography. Bush's approval ratings surged to near 90%. This is the most recent election in which the Democratic Party nominated a person with military service. Kerry chose Edwards, who had himself sought the party's 2004 presidential nomination, to be his running mate. Each of these states was won by the same party in 2004 that had won it in 2000; thus, George W. Bush received a net gain of seven electoral votes due to reapportionment while the Democrats lost the same amount. 2004", PBS.org Interactive Electoral College Map, Maps and cartograms of the 2004 U.S. presidential election results, Interactive Atlas of the 2004 Presidential Election Results, Alternate views of the electoral results map, Assessing the Vote and the Roots of American Political Divide, Probability analysis of Electoral College based on latest poll results by state, About.com, Democracy & Voting Rights – Ohio 2004 Election as Lesson in What Can Go Wrong, Campaign commercials from the 2004 election, Elections in which the winner lost the popular vote, Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, President's Council on Service and Civic Participation, 1978 United States House of Representatives elections, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_United_States_presidential_election&oldid=980623918, History of the United States (1991–present), November 2004 events in the United States, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from September 2020, Pages using bar box without float left or float right, Articles with sections that need to be turned into prose from July 2019, Articles needing additional references from November 2016, All articles needing additional references, Articles with Encyclopædia Britannica links, CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, On October 5, the vice presidential debate between Cheney and Edwards.