Polarized Politics and the 2004 Congressional and Presidential Elections
The 2004 elections left the Republican Party in its strongest posi tion since Herbert Hoover was elected president seventy-six years ago. George W. Bush won reelection by a modest but unambiguous margin?Bush won the popular vote, but by the narrowest percentage of any reelected president in history?(50.7 percent to John Kerry's 48.3 percent of the popular vote), while the Republicans solidified their congressional majorities by adding three House seats and four Senate seats. The election was not, however, a ringing electoral endorsement of the administration's or the Republican Congress's performance, nor did it represent any global shift in public sentiment to the Republican side. Rather, it was the product of two salient features of present-day American poli tics: the substantial structural advantage Republicans now enjoy in the struggle for control of Congress, and the extraordinarily polarized public reactions to the Bush administration, sentiments that found their fullest expression in the presi dential contest but also spilled over into congressional races. Although strengthen ing the Republican grip on power, the outcome did not break the national stale mate reflected in election results and public opinion polls over the past decade, and it is likely to intensify rather than diminish the level of partisan conflict among leaders and ordinary Americans alike during the second Bush administration. Table 1 summarizes the congressional results. The election brought little change to the House. Only seven of the 402 incumbents who sought reelection were defeated, and four of the seven were victims of a Republican gerrymander in Texas (discussed below), not swings in voter sentiment. The party already in control held onto twenty-seven of the thirty-four open seats (those vacated by