For those looking for something to complain about, the results of last night’s election offer no shortage of reasons to grumble. Those on the left can note that a black Democrat failed to win election as governor of New York, mainly because a lot of white voters, including hundreds of thousands of Democrats, chose instead to cross party lines to vote for candidates from the Republican or Independence parties who happened to be white. Those on the right can note, as we have in the past, that some of governor’s support from traditionally Democratic labor unions like the teachers and hospital workers has been bought with taxpayer money. And that the Democratic Senate victory in New Jersey sets a precedent for last-minute candidate switching.

By our lights, however, this morning after Election Day dawns brightly. Amid all the fretting among the opinion elites about a class war and the wealth gap, thousands of union teachers and Latino health care aides and Chinese-American garment workers went to the polls yesterday and voted for Mr. Pataki, a member of the party of the “powerful,” as Vice President Gore’s class war rhetoric had it. Mr. Pataki, for his part, is the grandson of an immigrant hatmaker who came to America from Hungary. He was running against a billionaire, Thos. Golisano, who is the son of an immigrant from Italy. And against a hero, in Carl McCall, who grew up painfully poor in Boston yet graduated from Dart mouth College and as comptroller was the sole investor of the state’s $105 billion pension fund.

It’s a picture that is easy to lose sight of in the midst of campaign attack commercials and overnight tracking polls. The cynicism can run so deep that when candidates talk about their rise from humble beginnings it often fails to make the newspapers. But taking a step back one can see that the American politicians and political parties in this election represent the rags to riches rollercoaster that is the American story. In most other countries, there are parties of the rich and parties of the poor. There are immigrant parties and nativist parties. There are deeply entrenched class divisions. In America, on the other hand, the poor want to become rich and often succeed, and when they do, there turns out to be no party in which they are not welcome. And all of them realize that their forefathers came over on boats only a few generations ago.

This is one of the astounding things about America, the feature of which the cynics fretting about income disparity fail to take account. In America, it turns out, even if the gap between rich and poor is widening, those who are rich today are the people who used to be poor. Study after study shows that America is a place of remarkable income mobility, both over an individual’s lifespan and over generations within families. We’ve always been in the camp that believes in the wisdom of the voters, and when labor and Latinos cross traditional party lines as they did yesterday and vote Republican, when the the president of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees declares it doesn’t feel any allegiance to the Democratic Party, we think it’s worth taking their vote seriously.

The Republican Party in this state has a long way to go yet in translating the American story to candidates for the Article I offices and other positions of importance in our national political life and to the City Council and other institutions closer to home. This is true when it comes to Latino and union voters as well as for those in the Rockefeller tax bracket. But the morning after the election, we tend to think not of the Republicans but of the republic. We don’t mind saying that the big picture this morning makes us wonder if there’s something more than coincidence to the fact that Election Day in this country comes just a few weeks before the holiday that one of the nation’s very first groups of immigrants set aside to give thanks for their blessings.