Timeline of the 2004 United States presidential election
aspect of history
This is a timeline of events during the 2004 U.S. presidential election.
2002
May 2002
May 31 – Vermont Governor Howard Dean forms a presidential exploratory committee.
December 2002
December 1 – John F. Kerry, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, announces his plans to form an exploratory committee for a possible 2004 presidential run on NBC's Meet The Press. Kerry anticipates a formal announcement "down the road some months".
December 16 – Former U.S. Vice President and 2000 U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore announces on the CBS program 60 Minutes that he will not seek election to the presidency in 2004. Gore had recently wrapped up a nationwide book tour, as well as an appearance on NBC's Saturday Night Live, and had been widely expected to run. U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman from Connecticut, Gore's 2000 vice presidential running mate, had previously promised not to run should Gore seek their party's nomination.
2003
January 2003
January 2 – U.S. Senator John Edwards from North Carolina announces formation of an exploratory committee for the Democratic nomination.
January 4 – U.S. Representative Dick Gephardt from Missouri, who was Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 until late 2002 when he stepped down largely in anticipation for a bid for the presidency, announces his intention to run for the Democratic nomination.
January 5 – Reverend Al Sharpton of New York announces his intention to run for the Democratic nomination.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7892639. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004, 2002, 2000 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Timeline of the 2004 United States presidential election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.