"What President Bush gained [on election] night was not the beginning of a new era, but what it may turn out to be is the opportunity to create a new era," said AEI fellow Ben J. Wattenberg at Election Watch on November 7.

AEI fellow William Schneider identified President Bush as the key factor in the GOP victory rather than strength on voters' concerns. The major issues, according to a Republican poll cited by Schneider, were the economy and jobs, education, and Social Security and Medicare--all issues that favored the Democrats. September 11, the war on terrorism, and Iraq--Republican issues--were not high on the list of voters' concerns. Yet, "the election was not determined mainly by the issues," Schneider said. "It was determined by President Bush's personal popularity."

AEI fellow Karlyn H. Bowman also recognized the role of President Bush in the Republican victory and noted that his character helped his party in this election. "There's something about this president's personality," she said. "I think one of the reasons the corporate scandals issue did not stick at all was because he's seen . . . as a man of honesty and integrity compared to Bill Clinton. Those early images formed in the 2000 campaign have served him very very well and then the personal and the professional response to 9/11 have made him extraordinarily strong."

Nonstop campaigning and staking his political reputation paid off for the president, AEI scholar Norman J. Ornstein noted. Recognizing the risk Bush took, Ornstein said, "We have to give enormous credit to the president and to Karl Rove who worked up . . . a gutsy strategy . . . that could have backfired [by] having him portrayed as a highly political president losing some of that aura of commander in chief."

Despite this Republican victory, the nation remains fairly evenly split, Ornstein noted. He argued that there has not been a Republican breakthrough or a major shift in political allegiances. A breakthrough "didn't come about with September 11. It didn't come about with the shift of Jim Jeffords. It didn't come about with the war on terrorism and pending war with Iraq, or with the sagging economy, or with this election itself." Yet rarely do election shifts represent massive top to bottom changes. Rather, "almost all result when the close contests, the tossups, go overwhelmingly in one direction and that's what happened here. What it takes is to have a small number of seats that could go fifty-one to forty-nine one way, go fifty-one to forty-nine the other way."

AEI research associate John C. Fortier saw the same divisions among the electorate as in the presidential election and noted continuing regional trends. The South and West are gaining population and are becoming increasingly Republican, while the Democrats remain strong in the Northeast and the Pacific coast.

The reason for the Democrats' defeat Schneider said, is "that they had no messenger and they had no message." In the face of this electoral setback, the Democrats are now "excoriating themselves for their party's timidity. . . . Democrats are saying: 'We failed to rally the party base to stand up to President Bush on the economy and on the tax cut and on Iraq.'" Schneider questioned the usefulness of this line of thinking. "If the president's popularity was what dominated this election, for the Democrats to say to themselves that we lost the election because we didn't stand up to this popular president is frankly just nuts."

The biggest lesson to be taken from the election is the role of President Bush, who placed himself in the center of the contest. "You cannot underestimate the risk the president took by doing this," Schneider said. "If it had gone badly, it would have seriously damaged his political standing. He put his clout on the line, and he saw it immensely enhanced by these results. So the bottom line for me is very simple. President Bush finally won his mandate, the mandate he did not win in 2000."