You have a valid point there. I lost respect for my fellow Americans at that point as well. There were two main reasons why Bush won in 2004:
1) The Bush campaign effectivly destroyed any chance that Kerry had when they revealed all the lies and mistruths about his war record and statements. The commercials using the Swift Boaters resonated highly with Americans and caused them to distrust Kerry.
Swift Vets and POWs for Truth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The Democrats made a poor choice in who to run against Bush.
2) Bush rigged Ohio. It's not a matter of conspiricy theory. It's a matter of fact. To quote from
Was the 2004 Election Stolen? : Rolling Stone, "Officials [in Ohio] purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count."
So we really had to overcome the illegal and shadowy politics of the GOP simply to get to the ballot boxes. Bush is the greatest threat to American Democracy in existance. We realize that and that is why he will go down in history as the most unpopular president ever (27% approval rating was the lowest in history). America will start again this November.