So saith Markos:

Now NBC is very specific that this was the first modern Republican candidate in their polling to have a net-negative favorability rating. So that suggests a Democrat has been there before, I’d guess Walter Mondale and probably Jimmy Carter. I decided to look up John Kerry’s numbers, since I assumed he would’ve also been underwater.

It turns out that Kerry, according to NBC polling, never had a net-negative favorability rating. At this point eight years ago, he was 42/35. Even after his September 2004 Swiftboating, he stayed above water 43/42, and was 44/43 right before the election.

For all the comparisons with 2004, that’s one big difference—Kerry was far better liked than Mitt Romney. And Kerry wasn’t exactly beloved.

Republicans are putting together quite the ticket—the least beloved Republican ever, alongside the most boring white guy they can find.

Can you feel the excitement?

Indeed. And this isn’t a puzzle. The 2004 election was mostly about foreign policy, and Kerry had reasonably good credentials to run on that issue. What he didn’t have was any sort of strong critique of Bush. Romney has even less of a critique against Obama than Kerry had against Bush, and while Kerry could point to his war record and his years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as reasons for voters to trust him, Romney seems to be losing those reasons as the campaign moves onward. His gubernatorial record is off-limits, apparently, and one wonders just how he’ll be able to approach his experience at Bain going forward. The ridiculous distraction of the “you didn’t build that” comment Obama made is a blatant attempt to distract from the fact that his primary selling point for the campaign has been decimated, though much more successful than prior attempts like dangling Condoleeza Rice as his running mate. Where does he go to next? If his case transitions into being all about the Olympics, then he’ll have entered even greater heights of irrelevance and self-parody (and, if this is true, he might have more questions to answer on that topic as well).

Of course, the two men do have things in common. Both became nominees out of entirely pragmatic calculations–Democrats were afraid of Howard Dean, Republicans of Rick Santorum, and both times a vanilla pick was picked by the elites. Kerry did manage to earn the trust (if not excitement) of the rank-and-file in a way that Romney has entirely failed to. Both Romney and Kerry relied to a large extent upon public dissatisfaction with the leadership rather than bold new visions. Romney is luckier in that he’s running in an economy where public dissatisfaction with the leadership is much higher than it was when Kerry ran, but you could argue that Kerry played a worse hand better, at least going by what we’ve seen to date. At the very least, he managed to keep above water when it came to favorability.