President Bush’s victory in the popular vote will put the fight over the final vote in Ohio in a very different light than the post-election contest with Vice President Gore in Florida. Surprises are always possible. But it was hard, at 3:35 a.m., when these words were written, to see much point to the quest that Senator Kerry has undertaken in Ohio other than to indulge a certain kind of bitterness, to poison American politics for the coming term, and to seek to dilute the extraordinary mandate Mr. Bush, if not yet in the Electoral College, has received among Americans from coast to coast.

With 93% of precincts reporting, Mr. Bush has won 55.6 million votes. That is more than the 50.5 million votes he won in 2000, far more than the roughly 47.4 million that President Clinton won in 1996 or the 44.9 million that Mr. Clinton won in 1992. More Americans voted for Mr. Bush for president than have voted for any other presidential candidate in American history, more even than the 54.5 million who voted for Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide.

As this page went to press, Mr. Bush was poised to be the first presidential candidate since his father in 1988 to win more than 50% of the popular vote — third party candidates prevented any candidate from winning that kind of simple majority in the past three elections. And the voters did not just re-elect President Bush — they sent him a Congress with Republican Mandate majorities in both the House and Senate. Mr. Bush even gained significantly in states that he lost the last time around. Here in New York, he won about 350,000 more votes than he did in 2000.

All this will amount, if Mr. Bush prevails in the Electoral College, to a mandate for a second term in which he accomplishes the things that he has promised. On the domestic front, that means tort reform to ease the burden on the economy and on doctors that is imposed by frivolous lawsuits. It means making the Bush tax cuts permanent, and at the same time reining in federal spending to achieve the deficit reduction that Mr. Bush has promised. It means fixing Social Security so that it is funded for the retiring baby-boom generation and making sure that younger workers have the chance to invest part of their Social Security money in the stock market.

On the foreign policy front, confirmation of the Bush victory means a vote of confidence by the American people in Mr. Bush’s strategic vision of defending America from the threat of Islamic extremist terrorism by carrying the fight for democracy and freedom to the Arab nations of the Middle East. Polls suggest that voters reckon that Mr. Bush hasn’t been too tough on the terrorists, but too easy on them. Mr. Bush will have his foreign policy work set out for him — not only seeing the mission through in Iraq, but working to spread freedom and democracy, and to stop terrorism, in places such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt. Not to mention the challenges of North Korea and China.

In those fights, we hope Mr. Bush follows through on the words in his speech in New York at the convention — a speech that played, we think, the pivotal role in gaining him the mandate that he has already received in the popular vote and hopes to receive in the Electoral College. “I believe that America is called to lead the cause of freedom in a new century. I believe that millions in the Middle East plead in silence for their liberty. I believe that given the chance, they will embrace the most honorable form of government ever devised by man,” he said. “I believe all these things because freedom is not America’s gift to the world, it is the Almighty God’s gift to every man and woman in this world.”