The fact that six national opinion polls over the weekend have placed President Bush and Senator Kerry in a statistical dead heat puts us in mind of Wellington’s famous quip about Waterloo turning into a “damn close run thing.” But Mr. Bush need certainly not despair. Witness the Australian general election, in which one of Mr. Bush’s closest allies abroad, Prime Minister Howard, was triumphantly and unexpectedly returned to Canberra for a fourth successive term of office with an increased majority. The conservative Mr. Howard was long written off by many of the pundits. He was alleged to be uncharismatic and tired, especially compared to the more “dynamic” and younger Labor Party leader, Mark Latham.

But Mr. Howard’s greatest sin in the eyes of Australia’s liberal-left was to throw in his lot with Mr. Bush, dispatching 2,000 troops to participate in the liberation of Iraq. This would have been bad enough in the eyes of Mr. Howard’s detractors even if everything had gone smoothly after the war. The drumbeat, though, reached a crescendo when things began to go awry and Mr. Howard was alleged to have misled the country on the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

It was also claimed that by supporting the American administration, the Australian premier had isolated the country and made it a target for terrorist attack – an allegation which critics asserted was vindicated by the recent Islamist bombing of the country’s embassy in Jakarta. One poll in September showed that Labor had even managed substantially to reduce the 30-point lead that Mr. Howard had enjoyed in December 2003 on national security issues.

But when the chips were down, Australian voters declined to behave after the fashion of the Spanish electorate following the Madrid train explosions in March. They did not succumb to the antipodean equivalent of “euro-isolationism.” Partly, this was because Mr. Howard was able to portray himself as a serious man in time of war, in contrast to his younger and more impulsive rival. The victory of Mr. Howard’s coalition can also be ascribed to its policies on domestic issues at both the federal and state level. Average Australians still accorded pride of place to the home front, despite the anti-American frenzy of the “intelligentsia.”

Mr. Howard benefited from one other priceless advantage denied to President Bush – the support of substantial sections of the “mainstream” Australian press. Considering the relentless drumbeat that the president faces from the press here, Mr. Bush’s buoyancy in the opinion polls is little short of miraculous. He retains a structural advantage in the Electoral College. Mr. Kerry has only three times held a statistically significant lead of more than 2.5% in the myriad national opinion polls since his nomination, and then only briefly. And the challenger remains behind the president in the critical realm of national security, still the issue for the world’s only global power.

One of the things that happened in Australia is that Mr. Latham appeared more and more shrill as the race went down to the wire. This phenomenon has been repeated by the Democrats in recent days, most notably in the form of the harassment of early voters in Florida and the tone of rhetoric. It was topped by the suggestion of the wife of Senator Edwards that there would be riots in Pennsylvania if her husband were defeated. In the end, Mr. Howard not only retained his office but increased his majority in the Parliament, sending a message not only to his countrymen but to Islamist terrorists the world over.