Astonishing Night When America Chose The Strong Man

Election day began badly for the Republicans. At 1pm, the first exit polls began to circulate on the internet. They showed startling leads for John Kerry. Another round of polls circulated at 2, then a third a little past 4.

True, there were peculiarities in these early exit poll numbers. One exit poll suggested that 63 per cent of the population of North Carolina was female. Another found a 10-point drop in the proportion of white Catholics in the voting population of Wisconsin.

But reporters dismissed these peculiarities because the polls' bottom lines jibed with their previous reports of heavy early voting and a surge in new registration. It's an old political rule of thumb that higher turnout favours Democrats - and the Associated Press was associating that turnout in 2004 might rise by as much as 15 million ballots over 2000, to 120 million in total. And didn't everybody agree that Democrats felt more intensely about this election than Republicans - and that young people had been jolted into activism by Howard Dean and the anti-war movement?

Reporters try to be fair. But they cannot help being creatures of their environment. The national political press tend to live in places where Bush is only slightly more popular than unvaccinated flu: Northwest Washington DC and its Maryland suburbs, Manhattan and media-favoured towns just outside of New York, and other places well served by commuter trains, latte bars, and ethnic restaurants. I live in such a place myself, and I can testify first hand to the effort it takes to remember that your neighbours do not necessarily speak for America as a whole.

So as the polls closed on the east coast after 7:30pm, a media consensus grew that Kerry was sure to win, and maybe win by 300 electoral votes or more. The images on television reinforced the consensus.

Heavily Democratic downtown DC switched into party mode. I had to cross town through funky Georgetown a little before seven o'clock: the mood felt like New Year's Eve, revellers spilling out of bars, cars packed in their lanes.

But then things began to move. President Bush picked up one of Maine's severable electoral votes, a gain from last time. Word began to filter into the newsrooms that the lines had extended just as long in Republican precincts as in Democratic ones. Voters in Georgia, Kentucky, and Ohio approved by heavy margins state constitutional amendments against same-sex marriage; the voters of eight other states would follow by midnight. The single most important issue in the election, according to a 22 per cent plurality of voters: morality. The much ballyhooed youth vote did not turn out in droves; the evangelical vote did. Republicans began picking up Senate seats, including Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's, and increasing their advantage in the House.

The faces on the European news broadcasts grew longer. A little past 11:30, the networks called Florida for George Bush; at 12:30 Fox News called Ohio for the President too. By then, President Bush had achieved a three million popular vote lead. It was all over bar the litigating.

This election is not a landslide re-election of the incumbent like 1972 or 1984. And yet in its own way, it may be more astonishing. President Bush had to climb a razor-wired wall of media hostility, with the New York Times and CBS in particular hurling allegation after allegation at him.

Americans disregarded it all. They voted for the man they saw as the strongest on defence and who showed the greatest respect for traditional morals and beliefs. They voted to curb the excesses of unelected judges. They voted to reply to Osama bin Laden's threats and bluster that they would not be intimidated - that they would see the war on terror through to its end.

In 2000, Democrats lost control of the White House, the Senate, and the House, but they could console themselves that they had put an asterisk beside those victories: George Bush failed to win the popular vote and the Senate was split. Then in 2002, the Republicans broke through in Congress and won a majority in both House and Senate.

It was defeat in 2002 that sent the Democrats spiralling over the edge into bitterness and fury. This election forces that party into a painful debate over its future - and forces the world to reckon with a George Bush who is no aberration, but a decisively re-elected leader of a nation at war.