×
I found this bit from the profile of John Kerry's unexpected resurrection to be fairly convincing:
In fact, some of Kerry's supporters now argue that, had he run in the current political climate, he would have won. "My feeling has always been that the mountain John Kerry had to climb was a hell of a lot bigger than the mountain Barack Obama has to climb," says David Thorne, Kerry's closest friend. Kerry himself isn't shy on that point. "On Election Day [in 2004], George Bush was at fifty percent; today he's at twenty-one or something," he said. "On Election Day, the right-way wrong-way numbers were forty-seven percent wrong way; today, it's eighty-five percent. On Election Day, the economy was pretty strong; today it's horrible. And, on Election Day, we were one year into a war; now we're six years into a war. So big shift in perceptions, energy prices, inflation, banking, foreclosures, just a totally different playing field. ... Which is another reason why I'm proud of what we did."Given that John Kerry lost by 60,000 votes in Ohio, it seems almost inarguable that those structural factors provided the margin. Of course, that doesn't mean that Kerry's failures as a candidate weren't real, and damaging. But in retrospect, they've almost certainly been magnified. His performance at the debates was frankly masterful, and he was brutally outspent. Bush wasn't toweringly popular at the time, but nor was he unpopular. National attitudes towards the war were complicated, Kerry was running atop a Democratic Party with fairly little swing state infrastructure (Democrats didn't have even one statewide office in Ohio), and the economy was in an expansionary period. Because we cover elections in terms of candidates, we tend to pin outcomes on candidates. But elections are, in large part, structural, and so are losses.
