I must say I was thoroughly impressed with the way John Kerry handled the election.

His concession showed a lot of class. I will admit it is not what I expected.

I expected an army of attorneys to descend on Ohio, combing through individual precincts, attempting to discover disenfranchised voters.

I expected lawsuits and a protracted legal battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But no. I was dead wrong. Kerry did the honorable thing.

Frankly, the election surprised me.

I wanted W to win, because Kerry was just a little too disingenuous for my tastes. And I pretty much always thought W would pull it off - until the final week.

After the Republican National Convention, I was making bold predictions about Kerry becoming another Michael Dukakis and winning only four or five states.

But the closer it got to the election, the more concerned I got.

First, there were the lackluster debate performances by W.

Then Kerry pulled off some pretty masterful demagoguery.

W will draft your kids.

W will cut your Social Security check.

W has exported your job overseas.

W allowed explosives to fall into the hands of terrorists in Iraq.

Plus, the deck was pretty thoroughly stacked against W in lots of other ways.

The 527 political organizations on the Democrat side expended millions of dollars denigrating the president.

We didn't get to see most of those ads because they ran almost exclusively in battleground states. But I went online and watched them.

Pretty nasty stuff.

On top of that, you had the whole MTV Rock the Vote thing going on. There were pop stars like that Diddy guy wearing "Vote or Die" T-shirts on CNN.

I heard a big feature on NPR where they were talking to Russell Simmons, that hip-hop record producer guy. He rattled off statistics from several rallies he helped organize where a total of nearly 100,000 young people were registered to vote.

Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi held hugely attended concert/rally events the week before the election.

There were all kinds of Internet-based get-out-the-vote Web sites for Kerry and a bazillion anti-W Web sites.

Now, this is not to say that the GOP was unorganized, but it just seems to me there was a lot more buzz in the news and on the Internet about Kerry's get-out-the-vote effort.

Perhaps the GOP just worked behind the scenes a little more.

On top of all this, there were problems in Iraq. The insurgents were doing anything but laying down their arms.

So over that final week, I must admit I was more than a little concerned about the fate of W's bid for re-election.

Then, on Election Day, there were stories all day about high voter turnout in general and high voter turnout specifically among young people.

This really had me concerned because the conventional wisdom in politics is that high turnout favors the challenger.

Voters generally don't turn out in high numbers seeking the status quo. Usually high turnout means people want change.

And high turnout among young voters traditionally has favored Democrats.

Add to all this the fact that no president in the history of polling data has been re-elected with an approval rating below 50 percent after Labor Day.

But no.

Conventional wisdom turned completely on its head. Convincingly turned on its head.

The margin of victory for W was considerable. And all those new voters and young voters who turned out in high numbers weren't all Democrats and protest voters.

A proportional number of them were W voters.

Frankly, I was stunned. Probably not as stunned as Kerry supporters, but stunned nonetheless.

So what gives? How could W win with all that stuff against him?

Enter GOP strategist Karl Rove.

Rove analyzed the 2000 election and noticed that somewhere around 4 million evangelical Christians didn't vote in the last election.

Get those people to the polls and W wins re-election decisively.

Rove was roundly chided by professional pundits and election watchers in both parties for eschewing the conventional wisdom on election strategy.

That strategy, called the "median voter theorem," says that both parties should head for the center of the political spectrum. The median voter resides there. Half the people are more conservative or more liberal than that median voter.

Get that voter to vote for you, you win the election.

President Bill Clinton, and his political adviser, Dick Morris, were masters at the median voter theorem.

Instead, Rove and W headed to the right. They aimed their campaign almost entirely at the Christian base of the Republican Party.

W talked a lot about "moral values." - leadership, abortion, gay marriage.

And he turned up a huge cache of conservative voters who were registered to vote four years ago but failed to get to the polls.

For every new, young, likely Democrat voter, there were probably 1.5 newly-motivated GOP base voters.

It was Rove's decision to try to motivate those apathetic Republican voters.

The strategy paid off. [[In-content Ad]]