An Old Fashioned Win by David Broder.

Money quote:

A crucial element of the strategy is the mobilization of religious conservatives, those who are normally more conscientious about going to church than about voting. Exit polls showed more than one in five voters Tuesday named moral values as the most important issue determining their vote — more than cited terrorism, the economy or Iraq. More than three-quarters of them supported Bush.
Terrorism was Bush’s trump card in this political game, a high card he had picked up with his stalwart performance after the Sept. 11 attacks and the emotional bond he formed with millions of Americans at that time.
But the economy and Iraq had disappointed or dismayed most of those who went to the polls, and it was remarkable that Bush could overcome the issues of war and jobs that would have sunk most other candidates.
It may well turn out, once the returns are analyzed in detail, that the supreme court of Kerry’s own Massachusetts helped the mobilization of these traditionalist and fundamentalist religious voters by its decision last year approving gay marriage.
That decision spurred the submission of initiatives against gay marriage that were passed on Tuesday in all 11 states where they made the ballot — including Ohio. Phil Burress, who ran the Ohio initiative campaign, told me last week that the volunteers who collected the signatures to qualify it for the ballot also registered 54,000 new voters. The Massachusetts court decision was “a lightning bolt that hit right in the pulpit and ignited the whole congregation,” he said.
That will no doubt cross Bush’s mind when he contemplates choices for the Supreme Court — a process whose imminence was dramatized on election eve by the disclosure of Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s serious illness.

Robert D. Novak’s article on the opinion page of the Washington Post today (I couldn’t find it at the Washington Post website), ends with:

“It is Republicans who would be facing internal carnage had Bush been defeated. Karl Rove would have been blamed for catering to the religious right, and the battle to moderate the party would have been joined. Instead, the antiabortion, anti-gay-marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the GOP will not abandon it anytime soon.”