Americans may not love their President but they could not warm to his challenger either - or dump their commander-in-chief in the middle of a war. Conor O'Clery in New York examines the reasons behind George Bush's convincing victory.
In the end it all came down to Ohio, with its 20 electoral votes. For John Kerry it was an excruciating case of what might have been. If just 150,000 voters in Ohio out of 5.8 million had voted the other way, today he would be president-elect John Kerry.
That title must have been in the Massachusetts senator's mind for a few tantalising hours on Tuesday afternoon, when exit polls conducted for the Associated Press and the television networks by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International showed him winning the election, not just nationally but in Ohio and Florida. The gleeful celebrations in Boston were premature.
Even if Mr Kerry had won Ohio by a whisker it would have been just as unsatisfactory a result for the country as that in the 2000 election, when George Bush took the White House while Al Gore won the popular vote.
This time Mr Bush won the popular vote by a much bigger margin. More importantly, he exorcised the ghost of the 2000 Florida recount that haunted his first four years by winning with a five percentage margin in the Sunshine State.
No more claims will be heard now about his legitimacy as President. The son of George H. W. Bush has won a firm mandate. He and his ruthless political adviser Karl Rove - who, if this was England, would surely get a knighthood for his strategic brilliance - won validation for a campaign that stressed conservative values combined with resoluteness in the war on terror.
A majority of voters said consistently that the country was going in the wrong direction but on Tuesday they declared that they did not want to change their commander-in-chief in a time of war.
Mr Kerry swept the Democratic strongholds of the north-east and California while winning the swing state of Pennsylvania, in a campaign based on criticism of the conduct of the war and the economy. But Mr Bush built up his votes in the south and the mid-west, attracting support from people for whom the moral values he espoused and leadership on terrorism were more important issues.
He won despite the war in Iraq. It was an election in which the key issues of guns, gays and God motivated Republicans as much as the anti-war sentiment motivated Democrats.
Mr Bush had the support of the Nascar dads, the security moms and the evangelicals. In the "blue" Republican states he capitalised on a culture where people are committed to their religion, and feel sometimes looked down upon by the leaders of the liberal culture of the big cities.
But in cities like New York there were also Republicans strongly supportive of Mr Bush for practical reasons, such as a desire to stay the course in the war on terrorism.
Mr Denis Kelleher, chairman and CEO of Wall Street Access, an investment company in Manhattan, also hopes that Mr Bush will be able to bridge divisions and get more done in a second term, without having to face re-election. "Bush has no vice-president that he has to protect," he said. "He can bring the country together, not wondering how it would affect his re-election effort. He will want to be judged as a statesman."
He would also want to heal frayed relations with allies.
The election also increased the Republican Party's majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Voters in post-9/11 America declined to renew their traditional preference for a divided government, where a Congress of one party acts as a brake on a president from another.
Not for 30 years has the Republican Party enjoyed such a long period in power in the House of Representatives. This monopoly in Washington gives Mr Bush an opportunity to push forward a conservative agenda that includes making his tax cuts permanent and advancing a constitutional ban on gay marriage.
He will have an opportunity to appoint two to three judges to the nine-member Supreme Court during the next four years. All the judges are getting on in years, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, aged 80, has thyroid cancer. If he retires, Mr Bush might appoint one of his favourites as chief justice, Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia, both of whom oppose Roe v Wade, the ruling which legalised abortion, and nominate a conservative judge to replace him.
Only time will tell if the President, who has so far governed to his conservative base, will reach out to become what he once promised to be, a "uniter and not a divider". He will certainly have to reach out to conservative-leaning Democrats in the 100-member Senate to make up the 60 votes necessary to break a filibuster on the judicial appointments he will want to make.
Given the second term that was denied to his father and a supportive Congress, Mr Bush may indeed cast an eye to history and make some tough legislative decisions, on social security and Medicare reform, for example, and try to bring down a federal deficit that will exceed $400 billion this year.
The President is also likely to shake up his team. No one in the administration paid with their jobs for mistakes and blunders in a war that has cost the lives of over 1,100 US soldiers and possibly 100,000 Iraqis - but perhaps they will now that the election is over and dumping a cabinet member will no longer be an electoral liability.
There is much speculation about who will come and go. The Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, now in his 70s, may depart to bring new civilian leadership to the beleaguered Pentagon. Colin Powell has made no secret of his unhappiness in the administration and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice has been tipped for his job. The new team will face some harsh realities abroad.
The insurgency in Iraq gathers strength daily, the US armed forces are overstretched. The war on terrorism is far from being won. North Korea may have half a dozen nuclear weapons.
The Democrats are devastated by the result. They can only ask: what more could we have done?
They energised an often fractious base in their rage against Bush, they got out a record turnout, they registered millions of new supporters. They matched the fund-raising ability of the wealthier Republicans and were helped by an election law that allows wealthy individuals such as billionaire investor George Soros to pour unlimited money into independent groups known as "527s" that could attack the opposition in TV commercials.
They had everything going for them. They took on the President at a time when Mr Bush was being battered with a steady stream of bad news. They had a candidate who won the debates with the President and managed to make it a close race, but they still lost the presidential election and they saw their numbers dwindle in both houses of Congress.
The conclusion will be drawn that they lost because the the President turned out to be a brilliant, energetic campaigner, though his relentless effort to win Pennsylvania fell short despite 44 visits, more than to any other state.
They lost because the Bush-Cheney camp managed to make the election campaign a referendum on the challenger, portraying him as a flip-flopper, someone who would send mixed messages to the enemy, who represented defeatism rather than strength.
No one who was in the United States during the last few months could have escaped hearing in attack ads Mr Kerry's own words to explain his protest vote against a war requisition used against him time after time: "I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
They lost most of all because the Republicans matched them in energising their base and motivating supporters on issues such as gay marriages and opposition to abortion.
A debate within Democratic ranks will now get under way - it has probably started - about who will challenge the next Republican candidate for the White House in four years.
If the majority in a deeply divided America has tipped towards the evangelists, what hope has a figure like Hillary Clinton, Democratic senator for New York, who has been vilified for years by the right?
There has been much talk about how the Clintons would see an opening for the former First Lady in a Kerry defeat. She may well make her long-anticipated run in four years but many Democrats will look for a more centrist champion. Her challenger in the primaries could be Mr Kerry's running mate, John Edwards, but he did not perform strongly during the campaign, and could not even keep his own state of North Carolina in line: it voted for Bush and his US Senate seat there went to a Republican.
Perhaps Mr Kerry will make another run in 2008 but defeated presidential candidates rarely get a second chance (Richard Nixon was an exception).
The deep despair of the Democrats was expressed by an Ohio Democrat, Dan Foley, the elected Montgomery County Clerk of Courts in Dayton. "I have never seen the kind of emotion and activism on the part of Democrats in a presidential campaign," he told me in an e-mail.
"Yesterday about 3.30 p.m. I saw a guy standing in the pouring rain with no umbrella and no raincoat holding a sign that said 'VOTE FOR CHANGE'. Sunday night I was driving home from a rally and about 10 p.m. I saw two middle-aged women putting Kerry-Edwards signs in a public right of way on a fairly busy street.
"People came to Dayton from all over because they knew they could possibly have an impact here. Bill Clinton called my house twice [ via recorded message] on the day before the election telling me to vote, ACT [ Americans Coming Together] called a couple of times seeking volunteers, and we had many people walking door to door for the last two months. One guy walking with me had streams of sweat cascading down his forehead last Saturday but he kept walking.
"Our county is the highest county in the state for mortgage foreclosures [ as clerk of courts, I'm the keeper of the record] as a percentage of the population; we have been hit hard by manufacturing losses; my wife knows a guy who is training the new person who is taking over his outsourced job; and now my state just approved this gay marriage issue that has nothing to do with either helping the economy or moving Ohio forward in a progressive manner.
"I am almost 40 years old and I can't remember feeling this bad about a campaign result."