The comparisons to 2004 are entirely too glib. There are several key differences that I see:
1) '04 was a national security election. Several embattled incumbents (Lincoln, Wilson, FDR) won with some variation on the "don't change horses in midstream" argument of Bush. Winning with this argument -- or
any argument -- is not as easy with a stalled economy.
2) Obama
is less popular, marginally, than Bush was. RCP has a
feature that allows you to compare Bush's first-term approval with Obama's on any given day. Currently, O's about two points lower than Bush was at this point in '04 -- not a lot but when you consider that Bush only won by 2.5%...
The other thing that strikes me when comparing the two is how consistent Obama's relative unpopularity is. He's been below 50%, though not drastically, the bulk of the time since the end of his first year. Bush, OTOH, was above 50% until about mid-February '04. The afterglow of his most successful period -- just after 9/11 -- was still in place for a lot of Americans, as frustrating as that was for those of us that opposed him. Obama's most popular period -- '08 through early '09 -- is further back and
feels like a lifetime ago.
3) Democrats had
no momentum coming into '04. We won the pop. vote in 2000 and had various demographic trends in our favor but the '02 elections were a disaster. There was a sense of starting from scratch with the Kerry campaign and the Dem activist groups who hit the swing states that year. The GOP is coming into this race with a big win in 2010, a decent shot at taking the Senate, and a base that is still pretty engaged and active, if you go by things like the WI recall and "enthusiasm" surveys.
4) Romney's not a great candidate, but his weakness can be exaggerated. Absent his war heroism, Kerry embodied a lot of what middle America didn't like about the Democrats, and he didn't expand the map anywhere except neighboring NH. Romney embodies the "rich Republican" stereotype that hurts in places like Ohio, but at the same time, he's not a Southern-fried Bush clone or a Tea Party extremist (in public perception). He's relatively free of geographic anchoring, which gives him some potential that Kerry -- blue-stater to the core -- never had; the selection of Ryan reinforces this. On a superficial level, he's not as weird-looking as JK and doesn't have a wife who comes off as a slightly tipsy Arianna Huffington clone (I liked TH-K, but boy did swing voters not).
Obviously, there
are similarities to '04, you'd have to be blind not to notice them, but it's generally the case that the more some bit of conventional wisdom is repeated, the more you have to question it -- like all the "Romney has a 25% ceiling" stuff from the primaries.
