To be fair, a large number of the people I spoke with said that it was Kerry who pushed them to vote against him...that they would have voted for a better Dem candidate.
Regardless, there are a lot of complexities that arose during this election.
I myself would have been upset if W had lost against any democrat, but I could live with it if the dems had nominated someone like Lieberman or Gephardt. But by making the choice that they did, I was voting as much for W as against Kerry, who turned me from a Bush supporter to a Bush zealot. I've said it before and I'll say it again--we were fortunate to get the Frost Belt, dispassionate, uncharismatic Kerry as an opponent. He gave us a fighting chance; if it had been some other, acceptable democrat, we might have not had much of one.