One of the main questions on the mind of many liberals like me is, what went wrong? Or put differently, why did Bush win? The emerging censensus is that, as one article at CBSNews.com put it,

The GOP base was bigger, more rural, suburban and Hispanic than they had ever imagined. . . The election also vindicated Bush’s unorthodox strategy of governing from the right and then targeting his voters with a volunteer-driven organization run through his campaign headquarters. Kerry played to the center and relied on a loosely knit conglomerate of liberal groups who paid get-out-the-vote workers.

Young voters didn’t increase their turnout as Democrats had hoped. Neither did blacks or union members, two keys to the party’s base. Bush, meanwhile, saw a surge in rural and evangelical voters, according to strategists on both sides. The rural vote, once reliably Democratic, swelled in size and supported Bush over Kerry. . . . Ballot measures to ban gay marriage may have driven GOP voters to the polls.

So in other words, Bush’s strategies of staying firm on his policies and his world vision, his appeal to “moral” and “family” values, and his “folksy” syle apparently worked. Or as another article put it, “President Bush’s campaign won re-election through the strategic gamble that there was more to gain from galvanizing conservatives and stressing moral issues than from reaching out to centrist voters.”

However I despise him, Karl Rove (the chief architect behind Bush’s campaign strategy) looks to be a genius.