Victory.

PRESIDENT BUSH won big on November 2, and anyone who says otherwise is just spinning. He won an absolute majority of the popular vote, which had not been done since 1988. He increased his percentage of the vote in at least 45 states. He increased his vote share among men and women; among Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Jews, and non-churchgoers; among Hispanics, whites, Asians, and even blacks; among urban voters and suburbanites. He won a larger percentage of the vote than any Democrat in the last 40 years. He is the first incumbent in 40 years to increase his party's seats in the House and the Senate while winning reelection. And he did it under difficult circumstances: According to the exit polls, most voters thought that the economy was "not good" or "poor" and that the war in Iraq was going "badly." To say that Bush beat John Kerry by only three percentage points, or by only 136,000 votes in Ohio, is to miss the point.

National-security and moral issues accounted for Bush's victory. A third of the electorate told exit pollsters that Iraq and the general War on Terror were the issue most important to them; 59 percent of these voters backed Bush. The president's confidence in American power outpolled Kerry's lifelong distrust of it. There has been some controversy about the extent to which Bush owes his reelection to evangelical and Catholic conservatives concerned about abortion and same-sex marriage. The consensus seems to be that these issues helped Republicans only slightly more than they usually do--which underscores the fact that the moral issues are a longstanding Republican advantage. Even in elections the Republicans have lost, as in 1992 and 1996, exit polls have shown, for example, that pro-life voters are much more willing to cast votes based on abortion policy than are pro-choice voters. If Democrats think they can win socially conservative voters merely by dropping God's name, they are going to spend a long time in the wilderness.

By any objective standard, the president has as much of a mandate as any president since 1980--and what's more important, he has the Congress. The Senate has shifted markedly to the right with the addition of committed conservatives such as Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn. John Thune's defeat of Senate minority leader Tom Daschle may lead other Democratic senators to avoid following Daschle's example of obstruction.

Moral issues played a large role in the Senate victories, too. Social liberals are trying to draw consolation from the exit polls, noting that 27 percent of the public favored same-sex marriage and another 35 percent favored civil unions--leaving only 38 percent against governmental recognition of same-sex couples. That is a change: As recently as six years ago, civil unions were seen as an extremely liberal idea. But note also that on every occasion when the voters of a state were asked whether they wished to ban same-sex marriage or civil unions, they answered yes. Defenders of marriage may need to change some of their tactics, but they have won the first round of the fight. They have a good shot at winning the second round, too, when federal-court appointments are debated in the new, more conservative Senate (but see our next editorial).

The election results did not just reflect trends in American opinion; they also reflected a superb job of retail-politicking by the Republicans. Alot of people deserve credit for the success of the Bush campaign, but above all the president himself. He was willing to gamble his presidency on the Iraq war. His campaign was cool, well paced, smart, and generous in its willingness to help other Republican candidates. (Bush's reelection campaign had bigger coattails than Reagan's.) The candidate himself was energetic and refused to buckle under severe pressure.

The heart of the Republican coalition has three chambers: free-marketeers, cultural conservatives, and national-defense hawks. President Bush in his next term should strengthen the first group, stand by the second, and vindicate the third. We hope to see, and conservatives should struggle to get, a stable and relatively free Iraq; al-Qaeda diminished; private investment accounts added to Social Security; conservative judges on the federal bench; and a ban on human cloning.

We still have our differences with this administration. We wish it engaged in public argument more, that it were a little less secretive, that it projected more of a sense that it could learn something from its critics. But the critics, including the conservative ones, could learn rather more from Bush. He may be in the middle of his presidency--a "lame duck," in the hilarious instant judgment of some journalists, still "misunderestimating" him after all these years--but a conservative era in American governance could be starting now.