Remaining cool through the night was a little harder for the candidates. Bush was with his father in the White House residence, having highly technical conversations about turnout models by phone with campaign manager Ken Mehlman. Bush wanted to know who was on talk radio making his case and whether everything was being done to win every possible vote. "He's like a political director who is President," said a Bush official. Once it was clear that the early rumors of a Kerry sweep were all wrong, the networks were playing it very safe about calling states. The job of declaring who would be the next President—and when the country might know—would fall to the campaigns.

In the old family dining room of the residence, Rove set up his computers. Bush called him regularly to ask about what was happening in certain precincts and districts. Finally, after midnight, the President was on the phone with his communications director, Dan Bartlett, discussing Ohio. Bartlett explained why the networks would be reluctant to call the key swing state. Bush then said, "Well, they just called it," although only NBC and Fox had. The room erupted into cheers. Bartlett held out the phone so Bush could hear. "Congratulations, Mr. President," Bartlett said, "You won the presidency." But it would be nearly 15 more hours before the President could come out and say so himself.

Bush was ahead in Ohio by 130,000 votes. But about the same number of provisional ballots—given to voters whose eligibility had been challenged—remained unopened. In elections gone by, that gap would still have been enough to put the state in Bush's column, but most networks exercised uncharacteristic caution.

As the night wore on, Bush officials spoke informally to the Kerry camp, urging Kerry to concede. Kerry advisers replied that their candidate would come to his own conclusion in good time. Undeterred, Mehlman reached out to John McCain's advisers, trying to get the Arizona Senator to call on Kerry to give in. McCain's advisers said Kerry would come to the decision on his own, as he ultimately did. Shortly after dawn, Kerry advisers gathered one last time to go over the Ohio math. By 9:30, the conclusion was clear: Kerry simply did not have the numbers. Campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill called Kerry at his town house. Within 10 minutes, he had called her back to say he agreed. At 11 a.m., Kerry called Bush to concede. He congratulated the President and urged him to unify the country. Bush called Kerry "an admirable and worthy opponent."

What finally swayed those near mythical voters who managed to make it until Tuesday without making up their minds? The weight that voters attached to values suggests that Rove's single-minded attention to the goal of turning out 4 million more evangelical voters than in 2000 may have paid off. On the other hand, there were voters like Jeffrey Wilson, 21, a student at the University of South Florida in Tampa, a gay Catholic raised in a conservative family but registered as a Democrat, who finally went with Bush. It wasn't the war that mattered. "I think they're both for stepping things up and cleaning up the mess we've created," he said. Instead it was a matter of character. "I just don't feel that I really trust John Kerry to do what he says he's going to do." For Andrea Levin, 39, of Seattle, who voted for Al Gore in 2000, it was the return of Osama bin Laden, who released a videotape taunting Bush four days before Election Day, that made the difference. "When he made his presentation, looking all spiffed up, and condemned the President's foreign policy, I saw that as a clear sign that I should vote for Bush."

Historians will have an easy time arguing that the race was always Bush's to lose; he scarcely ever ran behind, from Labor Day on. A country will seldom discharge a Commander in Chief during wartime, particularly one who had sustained a higher level of approval for longer than any modern U.S. President. Economist Ray Fair devised a model that weighs inflation and growth rates, and by his formula, Bush looked on track to win 58% of the popular vote. And he was running against a New England Senator so stiff, he creaked, when no non-Southern Democrat has won in 44 years.

So consider the obstacles Bush overcame and the rules that were broken by his victory. Since the country previously met at the polls, voters have encountered a record deficit, job losses, airport shoe searches, rising bankruptcies and bruising battles over stem-cell research and the definition of marriage. On the eve of Election Day, fully 55% of voters said the country was moving in the wrong direction. Only 49% approved of the job the President was doing, and anything below 50% is supposed to be fatal to an incumbent. A war that Bush promised would cost no more than $50 billion a year is running at nearly three times that. He was attacked by well-organized and well-funded detractors who described him as a liar, a fraud, a drug abuser, a warmonger, an incurious zealot, an agent of the Saudis, a puppet of his goblin Vice President. And he faced an opponent with a long record of public service, a shiny record from a war Bush had avoided and a Democratic base suffused with a cold and implacable hatred, a group that had never been so united—not over the war, not over tax policy or job losses or health care but simply in the purpose of bringing this presidency it so despised to an end.

Bush says the war on terrorism is not a clash of civilizations, but this campaign was, by his careful design. He never really pretended to have much to say to Democrats beyond I will keep you safe. He relied largely instead on inspiring those who agreed with him already, who don't want to see gay couples kissing on the evening news, think stem-cell research has been oversold and believe abortion on demand is a sin. Even Republicans who disagreed with him on one or more issues—the fiscal conservatives who prefer less extravagant government spending, the civil libertarians who would like a less intrusive Patriot Act—were still prepared to side with him. His 97% approval rate within his party surpassed even Ronald Reagan's. Bush plainly understood that his best weapon against Kerry was less what Bush did than who he was. You may disagree with me, he said at every stop, but you know where I stand.

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