Everybody calm down now. For all the despair that Democrats are carrying around in their heavy hearts and furrowed brows, Republicans are striding around like Vikings, justified and painless. What a difference a day makes.

Because on Tuesday afternoon, as early unadjusted exit polls were speeding their way through the Internet showing Senator Kerry ahead in swing states including Florida and Ohio, Democrats were exultant and Republicans were aiming knives at their bellies about to commit hari-kari. Before plunging in the blade they had no small number of unkind words about the Bush administration – frustrated e-mails and frantic phone calls about an incoherent communications strategy, a candidate who seemed alternately arrogant and lost. All is now magically forgiven. Victory has transformed the president into an emperor and Mr. Kerry, the briefly conquering hero, is now viewed as a crossbreed of Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale who should be locked in the attic when neighbors come over.

Neither, of course, is true. These perceptions are dependent on the votes of just more than one-percent of the Ohio population – 140,000 votes, less than half the population of Toledo. If Ohio had tipped the other way, Mr. Kerry would now be hailed as a genius and Mr. Bush a goat. There has got to be a better way to determine the leader of the free world.

So let’s take off the partisan blinders so popular after an election and look at the facts. President Bush increased his support by 10 million voters since the 2000 election – a historic total buoyed by high-turnout and a growing population – becoming the first president since his father to win more than 50% of the popular vote. Bill Clinton came close in 1996 with 49% in a year when third-party candidate Ross Perot took home 8%, but he did not clear the midfield line. A majority president – even at 51% – is good for the country, but it is far short of the popular and electoral landslides enjoyed by the last two victorious Republican incumbents, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Richard Nixon presided over a nation far more divided than the one we live in today, but despite the pop-culture crusades against him, Nixon won 60% of the vote in 1972 – totaling 48 states and 520 electoral votes.

Ronald Reagan in 1984 overcame a tough economy in his first term to triumph with 58.8% of the popular vote, totaling 49 states and 525 electoral votes.

George W. Bush resolutely met the worst terrorist attack on American soil to receive 51% of the popular vote, winning 30 states and 279 electoral votes (with Iowa still undecided).

For those of you keeping score with an American history textbook at home, this is the lowest number of electoral votes that any winning incumbent president has received since Woodrow Wilson in 1916. And no victorious incumbent Republican president in American history has ever received a lower percentage of the popular vote.

I know I’m raining on the right-wing parade here, but “such are the facts,” as H.L. Mencken once, “and I apologize for the Babylonian indecency of printing them.”

This is not a mandate for implementing a radical religious-right agenda nor is it even a landslide. It is, however, a good solid win for the Republican Party and yet another repudiation to the far left in American politics.

According to CNN’s adjusted final exit-poll numbers, 45% of voters in this election were self-identified moderates, as compared to 34% who call themselves conservative and 21% who describe themselves as liberal. Mr. Kerry won moderate voters by a margin of 54% to 45%, according to CNN. Independents were even more closely divided, giving Mr. Kerry a narrow 49% to 48% edge. It is also revealing to note that Ralph Nader, the far-left protest candidate parading under the Independent label, received only 1% of independent voters’ support.

Amid record turnout during wartime, the president was able to stay competitive among moderate and independent voters while rallying conservative faith-based and rural voters in unprecedented numbers.

Democrats need to do some serious soul searching. Because the sobering fact is that with the exception of FDR and LBJ, no Democratic presidential candidate in the 20th century received over 51% of the vote. America has always been a much more conservative country than it is a liberal country.

I don’t like breaking down the country into competing groups, but according to the Edison/Mitofsky nationwide survey, Mr. Kerry won only a majority of women, voters under 29, and minorities, including African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, and gays and lesbians. Mr. Bush won every other demographic. And, while there is considerable overlap, there are twice as many evangelical Christians as there are African-Americans in the U.S. – something urban voters tend to forget. Ballot referendums banning gay marriage passed by wide margins in all eleven states, including Ohio.

Activists on the far left inspire a backlash in the heartland. By the same token, unrestrained activists on the far right, who now smell blood in the water, may provoke a moderate backlash across America. The attitude that “there is no such thing as too divisive” – as one celebrating republican strategist told me – is dangerous to both the Republican Party and the republic.

The two parties are polarized, but at the end of the day we all live in the United States. After a hard-fought election, all sides need to come together and remember that what we share as Americans is far greater than what divides us. As the president said in his speech after Mr. Kerry’s concession, “When we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America.”