the Republicans had a way stronger position going into the election as they were running on homophobia while the cowardly Democrats backed away from the issue by not backing LGBTQ rights or gay marriage in general

nah i don't think so. though the dems leading the way on gay issues may have accelerated the development of legal protections, frankly the fact is that at the time, there just wasn't the cultural appetite for that (americans only started supporting gay marriage after the oracles on the Court decreed that the issue was beyond the political sphere, after which they fell in line, their bigotries manifesting in other axes of social friction).

dems lost because the economy was humming (first and foremost), and the war wasn't so far lost in the public consciousness as to make an anti-war platform credible (even after 20 years after afghanistan, the lost war of lost wars, americans were still kicking and fucking screaming when it was time to admit that they lost. biden's cratering in the polls at the time illustrates this). trust in american institutions was high, and the winning discourse was always a respect for the office, or the troops, or the american project generally.

and, of course, the dems didn't even run a consistent anti-war platform. they torpedoed dean and went with kerry, a horse-faced patrician gold-digging dipshit, who couldn't square this prevailing rule of institutional respect with the anomaly of contingent imperial overreach in iraq. he got swiftly swift-boated, and flipflopped his way to defeat.

~

really the easiest (and smartest, apparently) political calculation of the generation was by obama: just vote against the war (and do so without being a leading outspoken critic of it). if the war goes well, the war won't be an issue and it won't affect you down the line. if the war goes spectacularly poorly, as it did, it will continue to be the foreign policy issue du jour (de decade?), and you get to say i told you so at every opportunity.