Last gasp in epic battle reveals true state of nation

AT 11am yesterday morning, after all the bile and heat of the previous year, the US presidential election came to a close as quietly as you’d blow out a candle.

George W Bush picked up the phone to receive a call from John Kerry. The call, according to Bush aides, lasted five minutes and was cordial.

Once he put down the receiver Bush turned to his closest aides and said: "We have won, team."

It was a historic moment. George W Bush had overcome the smudge on his father's record card, a one-term president who failed to get re-elected.

In becoming the 44th US President Bush removed the shadow that had hung over his own first term, that of a president who won the White House with a minority of the popular vote.

If in pursuing a single-minded agenda of military aggression and a splurge of massive tax cuts that has created huge deficits he had divided the country, yesterday's results showed that he cut himself the bigger slice of the cake. His victories in the key states of Ohio and Florida were clear-cut. He had a margin of more than 3.5 million in the popular vote. His party consolidated its majorities in both the House of Representatives and Senate.

Kerry and his aides had spent the morning poring over the figures, but knew the gap in Ohio was too wide for the numbers to stack up. By 10am, they decided the game was up.

Afterwards, the day panned out into choreography with both men observing statesmanlike postures that were singularly absent for the previous six months.

The bony-featured Massachusetts senator emerged from his home in Boston just before 2pm to make his concession speech, gracious and accommodating. As he was speaking, Bush's script-writers were putting the final touches to the speech he was due to deliver to the nation an hour later from the White House.

"In their short conversation that morning, Kerry had referred to a divided country and the need to straddle the chasm that has created two nations. If you wanted a visual check of that, the state-by-state map of America provided one. The south and mid-west extending almost to the Pacific coast were all painted the red of the Republican party. The east and west coasts were solid Democratic blue. When it came down to the wire, the only two states that mattered were Ohio and Florida.

The last 24 hours was redolent of the wider campaign, uncertain, fraught, divisive, full of brinkmanship with deeply unreliable signals emerging from both sides.

Late the previous afternoon, as Air Force One landed in Washington DC, Bush's chief adviser got the first detailed data from the exit polls conducted across the nation. The president peered over his shoulder as he wrote the figures down. They did not look good, putting Kerry at a 51-49 advantage. The mood of GOP strategists was downcast Kerry looked like he had the edge in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.

But when the count results started coming in the picture changed. The first states to close the polls were all solid southern Republican ones. Bush had cruised home comfortably in each. And then as more detailed returns started coming in from Florida and Ohio, the pundits began postulating that the race would be very tight.

Not long after 10pm, the exit polls conducted earlier that day were beginning to look ropey the Bush campaign clearly had the wind at its back. Half-an-hour beforehand, the Kerry campaign was ready to forego Florida, confident in the knowledge that they would clinch Ohio and Pennsylvania. But the detailed projections for Ohio were beginning to show that the Democrats were beginning to slide badly. By 11pm, former Clinton special adviser James Carville was pessimistic, saying that Kerry would need an "inside run" in Ohio.

At the Republican Party post-election party in the cavernous Ronald Reagan centre in downtown Washington, you could sense the tide was turning. Key results showing Bush trends in Florida and Ohio had filtered through on the massive screens at the front of the auditorium.

THERE was still uncertainty. But by that stage the mood was so buoyant that it was as near as you could get to a party atmosphere. All around me, impeccably dressed young Republicans whooped as strong showings for Bush in New Mexico, New Hampshire and Wisconsin flashed up on the screen. The biggest reaction (of cheers and booing) was when the Democratic gathering in Harvard Square was shown you could sense the funeral atmosphere among the Boston Dems.

Kerry survived in Pennsylvania despite an unbelievable onslaught from Bush, but once he began being tailed off in Florida and Ohio, he could never recover. At midnight, his chief of staff, Mary Beth Cahill, was still talking gamely of Kerry being able to bridge the divide, with 250,000 votes still to be counted. But by then the Democrats had ceded Florida (won this time by a clear margin of 370,000 votes, compared to 527 in 2000).

The election would be decided, at most, within 36 hours and not the 36 days of 2000. There was brinkmanship from both sides. Republicans began to apply the pressure on Kerry to concede, expressing frustration that he was still holding out.

Bush had put clear water between himself and Kerry in Ohio. With a 136,000-vote lead, the chances of his rival bridging the gap by resorting to the 175,000 provisional votes was so remote as to be impossible.

These votes would all be challenged. Many of them would prove to be invalid. Kerry would need to get 100%.

But mindful of premature concessions in Florida four years ago, the Democrats dug in. At 2.30am John Edwards made a fighting speech in Boston, suggesting that the result would be in doubt for days, or weeks.

"John Kerry and I made a promise to the American people that in this election, every vote would count and every vote would be counted," he railed.

Two hours later, Andy Card, the White House Chief of Staff, made a pointed reference that Bush's lead in Ohio was "statistically insurmountable." He said the president had decided to give Kerry time to "reflect" on the results, ie that he was the loser.

Ultimately, the 2004 election will be seen as a ringing endorsement, if not quite a landslide, for George W Bush. The states fell exactly as they had in 2000, with the exception of New Hampshire (a Dems gain) and New Mexico (a GOP gain).

It showed the hostility generated by the Bush administration didn't extend to a large enough portion of America, or at least one that was large enough for Kerry could harness.

A couple of perceived wisdoms bit the dust. The strong showing of younger voters among a record turnout did not give Kerry the expected bounce. Though there were more young voters than ever, there was also more of every other age cohort. As a proportion, the 18-19 group accounted for 17% of the turnout, the same figure as in 2000.

The Democrats also put huge efforts into enticing the Hispanic vote in Florida. Expatriate Cubans, for historical reasons, have always sided heavily with the GOP. But there has been a large influx of immigrants from Latin America and Puerto Rico, whom the Democrats targeted. Conversely, the Hispanic vote favoured Bush more in 2004 than against Gore in 2000.

John Feehery, spokesman for the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Denny Hastert, yesterday told me that Bush's victory could be ascribed to a couple of clinching factors.

"I think the president was stronger on the leadership issues. I also think that he was strong on social issues. The social conservatives really came out for the president," he said.

The San Andreas fault that now runs through American politics finds different landscapes on either side.

For the GOP, it is predominantly rural, culturally and socially conservative. Bush had a huge appeal to the millions of Americans with deeply-held views on abortion, on gay marriage and who are hostile to what they see as the libertarian philosophy of the Democrats.

The key to Bush' majority, says Feehery and others, was his decision to target the four million evangelical Christians who did not vote in 2004. The get-out-the-vote campaign for that group more than matched the Democratic Party's feted election machine.

One-in-four voters in Ohio described themselves as 'born again Christians' and they backed the president in a stomping 7-1 ratio.

Kerry has his own Democratic Party base, but one that has been diluted over the years by weakened labour unions and the total ceding of the south (once a Democratic stronghold) to the GOP. Since the time of civil rights and John F Kennedy, no Democrat who is not from the south has won the White House. Kerry needed to extend his appeal to potential swing-voters in the south. It didn't happen. His running mate John Edwards (a southerner from North Carolina) had promised to deliver at least one southern state but he just seemed to lack impact.

And Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Yesterday morning, David Shouvlin, a Democrat-supporting lawyer from Columbus spoke of the gloom that had descended on the party there. In retrospect, he said, Kerry's hopes of clinching the state may have been wishful thinking.

"Ohio is a pretty conservative place. The Republican Party is very strong here. There are two Republican senators, a Republican governor and the Supreme Court is made up of a majority of Republicans. The Democratic Party is not very strong," he said.

At the end of the day, it was not a re-run of Florida. The nation may be divided but it is the president's nation that is the more popular one. In Ohio and elsewhere. Asked about relying on provisional votes the Democrats' last gamble Shouvlin came up with a gleaming phrase, referring to the river that flows through his city.

"I would swim across the Scioto River if somehow that would change anything."

On a larger scale, it describes the hopeless bind the Democrats find themselves in.