So here's the situation. The sitting US president is an incredibly divisive figure. The challenger is pushing a single big policy issue, in which he believes he's at an unassailable advantage. And the opposition are so fired up with loathing for the president that they've convinced themselves they can nominate a gaffe-prone plank of wood from Massachusetts and still walk home to a win.

If all this is starting to feel eerily familiar to you, it might be because we've been here before. Back then, the parties were the other way around, of course, and the killer-issue-that-wasn't was defence policy, not the economy. But all the same, some aspects of this election cycle are starting to feel a lot like 2004 all over again.

Back then, when our biggest economic problem was how to pay for the Iraq War, the Democrats hated Bush. Hated him. And that hatred was shared by vast swathes of the world, so much so that most of British left spent the autumn of 2004 repeatedly clicking refresh on various US polling websites. "Kerry's gaining!" we'd tell each other, ignoring the fact he’d been trailing since the conventions, convincing ourselves that, okay, he’s behind now, but he has to win because, well, look at the other guy. Obviously they couldn't re-elect George W. Bush. Obviously.

What we hadn't counted on was that much of the Democratic Party was feeling much the same way. They were so convinced of their own righteousness that they'd chosen a candidate who was just, well, there. John Kerry wasn't bad exactly; there just seemed to be little reason to vote for him beyond "not being George W. Bush".

This, it transpired, wasn't enough. Even Kerry's killer argument – that he'd served in Vietnam, while Bush was passed out under a tractor or something, and was thus far better suited to being president at a time of national emergency – ended up being used against him. Republican sympathisers who claimed to have served with him attacked his war record every three seconds for about six months, and 'swiftboating' ended up joining Watergate and McCarthyism in the US political lexicon.

Compare that to the present. The Republicans are so consumed with loathing of Obama that they've lost sight of the fact it's not shared by everybody else. All the moderates think they're frothing at the mouth. The Dems have turned Romney's business credentials against him, by making it an argument about private equity ethics, rather than the state of the economy. And, like Kerry, he's utterly unable to connect with the voters. Plus there's the plank of wood from Massachusetts thing.

Elections don't follow neat patterns, of course, and there's still nearly two months to go. Anything could happen, and when we’re watching President Romney sworn in next January this might start feeling a lot more like 1980, or some other election, or like nothing that’s ever happened before.

But to me, right now, it feels very 2004. The opposition have over-estimated their instinctive appeal to the voters – and underestimated the size of the job ahead.