United States Presidential Election of 2004 (Liberia, USA)

The United States presidential election of 2004 was held on Tuesday, November 2, 2004, to elect the President of the United States. It was the 55th consecutive quadrennial election for President and Vice President. Republican Party candidate and incumbent President George W. Bush defeated Democratic Party candidate John Kerry, the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts and Reform candidate John Hagelin of Iowa, the 2000 VP candidate. Foreign policy was the dominant theme throughout the election campaign, particularly Bush's conduct of the War on Terrorism and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The election would be marked historically with the choice of National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice to replace then incumbent Richard Cheney. Rice's choice would be the first time that an women and an african american to be chosen for a major parties ticket. This choice would hurt the Democratic Kerry/Edwards ticket and would spoil there chances for victory.

This would also be a year that the Reform Party was in decline as the Hagelin/Nader ticket would garner only 6% of the vote and would win no states, coming close in Alaska and doing well in Maine and Minnesota.

New Mexico would change alliegances in the 2004 election as in certain areas more than expected hispanic voters came out and voted for Kerry, thus gaining the nail biting close state of New Mexico.

Background
George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 by a tight margin over Gore and Ventura and wouldn't win a majority at 50% in the popular vote since 1992 like all other presidents.

Just eight months into his presidency, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 suddenly transformed Bush into a wartime president. Bush's approval ratings surged to near 90%. Within a month, the forces of a coalition led by the United States invaded Afghanistan, which had been sheltering Osama bin Laden, suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks. By December, the Taliban had been removed as rulers of Kabul, although a long and ongoing occupation would follow.

The Bush administration then turned its attention to Iraq, and argued the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq had become urgent. Among the stated reasons were that Saddam's regime had tried to acquire nuclear material and had not properly accounted for biological and chemical material it was known to have previously possessed. Both the possession of these weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the failure to account for them, violated the U.N. sanctions. The assertions about WMD were hotly debated from the beginning, and their basis in U.S. military intelligence undermined by the subsequent failure to find any WMDs in Iraq. This situation escalated to the point that a coalition of about forty nations, including the United States, invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. Within about three weeks, the invasion caused the collapse of both the Iraqi government and its armed forces. On May 1, George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, in a Lockheed S-3 Viking, where he gave a speech announcing the end of major combat operations in the Iraq war. Bush's approval rating in the month of May was at 66%, according to a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll. However, Bush's high approval ratings did not last. First, while the war itself was popular in the U.S., the occupation lost support as months passed and casualty figures increased, with no decrease in violence nor progress toward stability or reconstruction in Iraq. Second, as investigators combed through the country, they failed to find the predicted WMD stockpiles, which led to debate over the rationale for the war.

Candidates

 * President George W. Bush of Texas

Bush's popularity as a wartime president helped consolidate his base, and ward off any serious challenge to the nomination. Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island considered challenging Bush on an anti-war platform in New Hampshire, but decided not to run after the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003.

On March 10, 2004, Bush officially clinched the number of delegates needed to be nominated at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. Before this, Cheney would declare that he wasn't running for the office of Vice President again and Bush would have to find an replacement. Bush's new choice would come from National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice and this would invigorate the Republicans and the Bush/Rice ticket would be nominated at the convention in New York City. During the convention and throughout the campaign, Bush focused on two themes: defending America against terrorism and building an ownership society. The ownership society included allowing people to invest some of their Social Security in the stock market, increasing home and stock ownership, and encouraging more people to buy their own health insurance.