If John Kerry had won the election in 2004, we would still be in Iraq and things would still be going bad. The republicans would be sitting on the sidelines saying “if Bush was still in office this wouldn’t be happening”. And then democrats would have lost seats in the Senate and House in the 2006 elections.
Instead, the democrats have taken control and Bush was given more time to solidify is place in history. It’s not going to be a good place.
While I dearly wish that Al Gore had won in 2000, I've often thought how absolutely ugly things would have gotten had he been president and had September 11 still gone through as it did. I doubt that the country would have rallied around the president. The right would have gone into a tizzy about how Clinton/Gore had allowed the terrorists to strike the US.