For a President who loves the game and knew this was his last campaign, Bush sounded on Tuesday morning like a man at peace. "This election is in the hands of the people," he said after he voted, "and I feel very comfortable with that." He was host of a gin-rummy tournament on Air Force One as he headed from Crawford back to the White House to wait out the results. It was on the plane that strategist Karl Rove started calling around to get the results of early exit polls. But the line kept breaking down. The only information that came through as the plane descended was a BlackBerry message from an aide that simply read: "Not good." Not long afterward, Rove got a more detailed picture and told the President and senior aides the bad news. Florida Governor Jeb Bush had been saying the state was looking good, and the Bush team had expected to be ahead in Ohio. But Kerry was leading everywhere. "I wanted to throw up," said an aide onboard. Bush was more philosophical: "Well, it is what it is," he told adviser Karen Hughes. On the ground in Arlington, Va., that afternoon, chief strategist Matthew Dowd was walking around Bush campaign headquarters looking like a "scientist whose formulas were all wrong," said a top Bush staff member. Dowd had designed the strategy for targeting voters, and the exit polls were undermining his every theory. It would take him six long hours to crack the code. When the actual vote counts started coming in at 8 p.m., Dowd noticed that in South Carolina, Virginia and Florida the numbers were what the Republicans expected them to be; the President was outperforming the exit polls. "We've got to go talk to the press. The exit polls are wrong," Dowd said.

The emotional route of Kerry's day passed Bush's somewhere halfway, traveling from wild hope to stunned despair. After one last dawn campaign visit, a triple-witching photo op on the Iowa-Wisconsin-Minnesota border, Kerry flew back to Boston for his ritual Election Day lunch at the Union Oyster House. Superstitious, he wore his lucky Red Sox cap, carried an Ohio buckeye in one pocket and a clover in the other and refused to let his speechwriters work on election-night speeches of any flavor. But he wasn't relying entirely on voodoo. He spent the afternoon doing satellite interviews in key markets, 38 interviews over four hours.

All along, the Republicans predicted they would beat the Democrats in the final 72 hours because the Dems were relying on hired help whereas the G.O.P. was running its ground game with volunteers. At Bush campaign rallies throughout the year, anyone who came through security was asked to register. If they were already registered, they were asked to volunteer. Those who had already volunteered were scheduled to go on buses after the President left so that they could walk precincts and knock on doors. The chance to get close enough to shake the President's hand was not reserved for big donors, as in the past. The ones who got the lucky bracelet that allowed them into that proximity were the ones who promised to work in the phone bank after the event.

The G.O.P. knew that every last disciple would be needed because the Democrats had so much money to spend this time. The liberal 527 America Coming Together (ACT), which overall spent $125 million registering voters and turning them out, had 30,000 paid foot soldiers in Ohio alone, making ACT, for a day, the state's biggest employer. And alongside act was an army of free-lancers and first-timers and recruits from every Democratic activist group, matching the Republican faithful step for step.

For all the warnings of turmoil on Election Day, most people were on their best behavior. Even at war, there was civility. In New Mexico a law student policing the polls for the Democrats lent her cell phone to her Republican counterpart. In Merrimack, N.H., volunteers from MoveOn.org passed out hot cocoa to activists holding signs outside the polling place—Republicans and Democrats alike. "We might be a battleground state," said voter-protection volunteer Chris L'Estrange in Des Moines, Iowa, "but there's not much of a battle." Florida state troopers suspended safety checkpoints for the day to avoid any accusations of trying to suppress turnout.

For weeks, both campaigns had suspected it could all come down to Ohio, a state no Republican has ever lost and still won the White House. More than two-thirds of precincts were using punch-card ballots, with their potentially hanging chads. So Democrats acquired 611 punch-card machines, some of them discarded from Florida and Michigan and others found on eBay, so volunteers could hold little seminars outside key precincts on how to vote correctly. Republicans dispatched vote counters to every county election board so they would give the campaign an early read about where Bush might be lagging. Back at campaign headquarters in Washington, the information streamed toward operatives sitting at laptops watching their maps change color. A county colored blue meant that Bush was doing better than he had in 2000. The Ohio map just kept getting more blue. In some places it bled dark blue, almost purple, indicating areas where Republicans had improved 10% from four years ago.

Three times over the course of the day, poll watchers from both parties could enter precincts and scan the lists of voters to see who had turned out and who had not. Then they called their war rooms so volunteers—the Republicans called them flushers—could call the voters who hadn't yet cast a ballot, give a pep talk, offer a ride. In Franklin County the board of elections handed out more than 800 cell phones to the nonpartisan precinct judges there so they could call the board to report any problems or ask questions. In the end "the good people of central Ohio have kept their cool heads," said Doug Preisse, chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party.

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