I know this is pedantic, but the system selected Bush in his first election. Vietnam veteran and Southern Senator Al Gore won the popular vote. Only in his second election, as a wartime President, did Bush win the popular vote.

Thanks, I didn't know that

I would add to that that it wasn't even a regular EC victory the first time for W Bush, but the conservative supreme court gave him the win [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore

This is important -- as in, history books important. Two things: whomever won was going to inherit a balanced budget, and (in hindsight) be able to claim wartime priorities due to a pair of terrorist attacks. Those are highly influential for Gen-X and later generations, and not honestly impactful at all for Boomers and prior generations. Bush did not carry younger voters in either election.

In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that Florida, counting too slowly yet not carefully-enough, could not fully count their ballots. Every other state had successfully counted, but the Court sat through Florida's legal arguments, even though the state was a poster child for inadequate election planning. So, the popular vote would not matter. Statistically, if you don't count Florida, Gore's districts accounted for 60% of American GDP, and Bush's only 40%. This statistic becomes only more lopsided: in 2024, Biden would lose and election even though Trump represents only 30% of American productivity.

Anyway, in 2004, today's median American was still a minor. Giuliani would give the convention address for Republicans in New York; he re-used then-Senate candidate Barack Obama's catchphrases. It was the highpoint of his career. He would only be noteworthy among the unusually-named group "white ethnics" of the Republican Party from then on.