Stephen Bainbridge has posted a graphic of the distribution of votes by religious affiliation.

So the media would have us believe that the President was re-elected by a ground swell of support from “Values Voters”. James Joyner wants to put that myth to bed.

Michael Barone comments on possible Democratic shenanigans with the exit polls.

Erick Erickson has some more thoughts about the polling data over on Redstate. He goes a little bit further than Barone: “Somebody had the numbers sooner than they should have been released. Somebody leaked those numbers and tried to suppress the Bush vote. I’m willing to go the next step and say those numbers were orchestrated intentionally to have the effect they had while people were still out voting.”

Update: Here’s more on the exit polling and it’s effect on Republicans.

Update II: Stephen Bainbridge relates an anecdote from a Republican election lawyer supporting the case that the exit polls were being gamed by Kerry supporters. He’s asking for supporting data. So how about it? Did anybody else see something fishy going on?

Here’s another great article from Mark Steyn on the Election.

How about that? Alas for the Republican party, Lady Antonia and her chums never got round to writing to New Jerseyites and Pennsylvanians and Oregonians, or we’d be looking at a Bush landslide. Instead, Republicans had to settle for a little less. But, despite the best efforts of the US media, the Guardian, some even phonier than usual ‘exit polls’, Bruce Springsteen and ‘Rock The Vote’, Puff Daddy and the ‘Vote Or Die’ rap-the-vote movement, George Soros and Steve Bing and the million trillion bazillion dollars they poured into Ohio, respected foreign leaders like Yasser Arafat and Kim Jong Il, the Arab street, an attempted ‘October surprise’ by the UN’s Mohammed al-Baradei and the New York Times, and a late intervention by the late Osama bin Laden (which seemed awfully close to ‘Vote Kerry or die’), it was still a Republican night.

He discusses the echo chamber that is the media and the Democratic party, and looks at the increasing irrelevance of the Democrats. And also, examines why the Republican win wasn’t bigger.

(From LGF)

Beldar explains why the President, despite a 3-point margin, has a mandate from the American people.

In the only public opinion poll enshrined in our Constitution, the American public has spoken. Through the mechanisms specified in that Constitution, the results of that polling have become abundantly clear. Of course there are risks and uncertainties in the future; that would have been true too even had the result Tuesday gone the other way. But President George W. Bush does indeed have a visible, demonstrable mandate to back his constitutional powers and his discharge of his constitutional responsibilities. Without gloating, without belittling those whose votes were for his opponent, that is something that I am proud to celebrate.

I took a screen capture of the map from CNN’s election website.

Victor Davis Hanson writes about the election of 2004.

The revisionists kept repeating in this campaign that Afghanistan was lost to the warlords due to “taking the eye off the ball in Iraq” and “outsourcing” the fighting and thus losing bin Laden. George Bush ignored these second-guessing experts, assured the American people that, like our forefathers who won WWII, a much richer America could still fight and win two conflicts at once, and that bin Laden, in the manner of a Karadzic or Mladic, was a doomed man – his end a detail of when, not if.

The harpies shrieked that Saddam’s petrofueled barbarity was not connected with al Qaeda or even the larger wave of Islamic terrorism – as if, say, Aryan Nazis could not have had anti-democratic alliances of convenience with Asian imperialists in Japan; as if the first World Trade Center bombing, the North Africa killings, the career of Zarqawi, and the al Qaedists in Kurdistan were either nonexistent or irrelevant.

In response, George Bush maintained that Islamic fascism is global, fed by self-induced failures of Middle East autocrats, who hand-in-glove with terrorists diverted the frustration of the Arab Street against America – a hyperpower that is not, pace bin Laden, libertine weden but rather their worst nightmare. Autocracy is their illness, and emocracy, not American apologies, is their cure.

The administration maintained, without wavering, that those who were blowing up Americans in Kabul, or Baghdad, or Westerners in Madrid and Bali were of the same ilk. Their differences were the stuff of legalistic nit-pickers who might have equally parsed Mussolini’s fascism from Hitler’s Nazism or claimed that Mao’s Marxism so differed from Stalin’s Communism that the two could never have teamed up in Korea with yet a third wild-card totalitarian.

George Bush – through the beheadings, the kidnappings, Abu Ghraib, the hysteria of a Richard Clark, Joe Wilson, Anonymous, Rathergate, the 9/11 Commission, CIA rogue analysts, cheap European slurs, insane remarks from Walter Cronkite to Bill Moyers, and last-minute media fabricated “scandals” – has never faltered, so confident was he in the exceptionalism of America and the unshakeable resolve and competence of the U.S. military.

Most of the American people, of course, agreed all along.

Mark Steyn:

Bush hatred flopped big on Tuesday. That’s not a problem for The Guardian’s editors, who have to sell papers in Britain, but it is for a Democratic Party that has to sell itself in the US. Michael Mooronification damages everyone who gets it.

BBC News is asking Americans, ”Why did you vote for Bush?”

The President is shaping his agenda for the new term.