enator John Kerry conceded the race for president this morning, calling President Bush at the White House to congratulate him after his aides conceded he would be unable to win a victory in Ohio.
Mr. Kerry called Mr. Bush at 11 a.m. this morning at the White House, aides said.
"He said, 'Congratulations, Mr. President,' '' Mr. Kerry's press secretary, Stephanie Cutter said. She said Mr. Kerry, in what she described as a "courteous conversation," told the president that he thought it was time to "unify this country.'
Mr. Kerry scheduled a speech for 1 p.m. in Boston to offer a formal concession. Mr. Bush was planning to deliver his own speech later today.
The call came after Mr. Bush's aides said that the president had won Ohio's 20 electoral votes, which, combined with his victory in Florida, would put him over the 270-vote threshold and guarantee him a second term.
Early this morning, Senator John Edwards, Mr. Kerry's running-mate, had said that the Democrats wanted to wait until provisional ballots were counting, holding out the possibility that the Democrats could still pull out the state. Mr. Kerry's aides said that after reviewing the situation in Ohio, they decided it was now impossible that he would win.
With 98 percent of the national vote reported as of 8 a.m. Eastern time, Mr. Bush was leading Mr. Kerry by a margin of 51 percent to 48 percent, giving the president an overall edge of about 3.5 million votes.
In Ohio, with 99 percent of the vote reported, Mr. Bush was leading by a margin of 51 percent to 48.5 percent for Mr. Kerry, or an edge of about 130,000 votes.
Senator Kerry had been pinning his hopes on as-yet-uncounted provisional ballots, which voters can cast if there is some question about their eligibility to vote when they appear at a polling station. Ohio officials said they knew of 135, 149 such ballots. In addition, a dozen counties had not yet totaled their provisional ballots, but in the past these counties accounted for about 10 percent of the provisional ballot total.
President Bush currently holds a margin over Mr. Kerry of about 130,000 votes in Ohio. Mathematically, the 135,149 known provisional ballots, plus the 10 percent or so say, 13,000 to 15,000 estimated to have been cast in the dozen counties still to report them, would give Mr. Kerry an opportunity to overtake President Bush. But that would mean that nearly all the provisional ballots would need to be accepted which has not been the case in the past and then Mr. Kerry would need to win nearly all of them.
Republicans said Mr. Bush was holding off a bit on declaring victory this morning in order to give Mr. Kerry time to concede. "I hope over the course of the day the obvious reality will become apparent" to Mr. Kerry, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, said on CNN today. But earlier this morning, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, Mr. Kerry's running mate, made a brief appearance in front of a crowd of supporters at Copley Square in Boston to announce that he and Mr. Kerry would not concede.
"It's been a long time but we've waited four years for this victory,''
he said to thousands of people who earlier had been expecting Mr. Kerry to be delivering a victory speech on that very spot. "We can wait one more night."
In what sounded like a hint of concerted legal action ahead, Mr. Edwards added tersely: "John Kerry and I made a promise to the American people that in this election, every vote would count and every vote would be counted.
Tonight, we are keeping our word."
Mr. Kerry's aides said they believed the Ohio vote could still be turned around once provisional ballots those submitted by people who were unable to vote because their names not on registration rolls had been tallied.
"The vote count in Ohio has not been completed,'' said Mary Beth Cahill, Mr. Kerry's campaign manager. "There are more than 250,000 remaining votes to be counted. We believe when they are, John Kerry will win Ohio."
But Mr. Card disputed that assertion and he said Ohio's top election official, Kenneth Blackwell, told him that the president's vote margin was a "statistically insurmountable lead, even after provisional ballots are considered."
The dispute provided a chaotic conclusion to a long gyrating night of counting that vividly recalled the turmoil of four years ago. In addition to the problem in Ohio, Iowa officials said they would do a recount in that state, where Mr. Bush had a lead of 14,000 with 99 percent of the vote counted.
An evening of confusion and deflation for Mr. Kerry's aides and Democrats across the country was caused in no small part by surveys of voters leaving the polls, which showed Mr. Kerry leading Mr. Bush by as much as 3 percentage points nationally.
Taken together, it marked a glum night for the Democrats. Unlike 2000, Mr.
Bush won with with the support of more than 50 percent of the country. In addition, Republicans gained seats in the House and in the Senate, and Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader, was defeated in his bid for re-election.
Americans turned out in big numbers to vote, according to officials from both parties, lining up at polling places across the country from Ohio to Florida, from New York to Minnesota in an evocative conclusion to one of the most emotionally charged campaigns in a century.
Polls taken up to the eve of the election showed Mr. Bush tied with Mr.
Kerry, and party officials suggested that the turnout in this hard-fought election could match the modern-day record of 63 percent set in 1960. In Ohio, lines were so long that some polling places stayed open past the 7:30 p.m. closing time.
One in seven people who voted yesterday did not participate in the 2000 election, and 60 percent of those voters said they supported Mr. Kerry, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls. A survey of voters leaving the polls suggested that the turnout was at least partly inspired by anger among Democrats lingering from Mr. Bush's disputed victory in 2000.
But White House officials said they remained confident that the Republicans' own turnout effort aimed at evangelical Christians who Mr.
Bush's advisers believed had failed to vote in 2000 was countering the opposition to Mr. Bush, and would rescue him from facing the fate of his father, who lost re-election to Bill Clinton in 1992.
Mr. Bush won Florida, seizing one of the big three states that have become the focus of both parties for much of the year and the state that was at the emotional fulcrum of the battle of 2000. Mr. Kerry won the second of those three states, Pennsylvania. For all the concern before the voting about irregularities at the polls, there were few reports of problems as night fell across the country, even in states where Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush had dispatched squads of lawyers, all briefed up but with no courts to go to. Late last night even before the polls had closed in Nevada and Iowa, two particularly competitive states, Mr. Bush summoned reporters and photographers to White House residence where he was watching election results with his family, including his father, the former president.
"We're very upbeat, thank you," Mr. Bush said. "I believe I will win."
A little while later, a senior Kerry adviser, Joe Lockhart, appeared before reporters to say much the same thing. "The first state that we believe will flip is New Hampshire," Mr. Lockhart said, referring to a state that Mr.
Bush won in 2000 and that Democrats are confident of winning this time.
But as the night churned on, facing excruciatingly close tallies in Ohio, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Iowa, aides to Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry were contemplating another inconclusive election night, though none suggested they were facing a repeat of the 36-day count of 2000.
"We're counting all the votes,'' said Mike McCurry, Mr. Kerry's chief spokesman. "At the end of the day, we win. I'm not sure what day, but we win."
Ralph Nader, the independent candidate who many Democrats believe effectively handed the White House to Mr. Bush in 2000 by drawing votes from Al Gore, was winning a minimal number of votes and did not appear to be a factor in the outcome of the race.
It was an appropriately chaotic end or near-end of the 2004 campaign in many ways began the night in December 2000 when the United States Supreme Court effectively declared Mr. Bush the nation's 43rd president. It took place during one of the most difficult periods of the nation's history, framed by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that took place less than one year into Mr. Bush's term. The attacks shaped not only Mr. Bush's first term as president, but also his re-election campaign against Mr. Kerry.
In a sign of the intensity of the contest, both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry took the unusual step of campaigning right through Election Day. Mr. Kerry began his day visiting a campaign office in LaCrosse, Wis., while Mr. Bush brought Air Force One into Columbus, Ohio, for one last visit to a state he won in 2000, but where he was struggling for victory again. No Republican has won the presidency without winning Ohio.
Mr. Bush flew to Ohio from Texas, and he dropped in on the state's Bush-Cheney headquarters in Columbus to thank campaign workers.
At one point Mr. Bush took the phone from a volunteer, Mick Turner, who was making calls urging voters to get to the polls, and said: "Julie. This is President Bush calling. How are you? No, I promise you it's me."
Mr. Bush then put one finger in his other ear to hear her better and said:
"I'm proud to have your support. I appreciate you taking my phone call.
Thank you so very much." Mr. Bush then hung up and said to reporters, "1 to 0."
Mr. Bush voted in Crawford, Tex., at 8 a.m. with his wife and twin daughters. The president's eyes were puffy from a 19-hour, seven-stop, six-state campaign swing the day before, and he appeared calm if wistful as he talked to reporters.
"This election is in the hands of the people, and I feel very comfortable about that," he said. "The people know where I stand. I've enjoyed this campaign. It's been a fantastic experience traveling our country, talking about what I believe and where I'm going to lead this country for four more years."
Asked if he had any words for Mr. Kerry, the president responded: "I wish him all the best. You know, he and I are in the exact same position. We've given it our all and I'm I'm sure he is happy, like I am, that the campaign has come to a conclusion."
In Wisconsin, which Al Gore won in 2000, Mr. Kerry went to an office to pump up supporters before heading home to Boston, where he cast his ballot with his daughters before lunching, as he has every Election Day he has run for office since his first victory in 1982, at the Union Oyster House.
"This campaign has been an amazing journey, a wonderful journey," he told reporters after emerging from the polling place at the historic Statehouse downtown. "The American people have put their homes, their hearts to us."
Mr. Kerry, at once nostalgic and exuberant, said that he was "very confident that we made the case for change," but that "what's really important is that the president and I both love this country."
"Whatever the outcome tonight," he added, "I know one thing that is already an outcome our country will be stronger, our country will be united, and we will move forward, no matter what, because that's who we are as Americans. And that's what we need to do."
This campaign came to a conclusion even an uncertain one shaped by the three forces that had formed it from the beginning: the attacks of Sept.
11, the disputed election of 2000 and the war in Iraq.
From the start of this contest, Mr. Kerry presented himself as the Democrat best able to take on Mr. Bush because of his record as a Vietnam veteran which, he said, would allow him to hold his own with the president on security issues, and turn the campaign to what he argued would be strong ground for Democrats: domestic issues.
With the economy struggling and the war in Iraq going off course, Mr. Bush increasingly built his campaign around the threat of terrorism, invoking the symbols of the attack on the World Trade Center and portraying Mr.
Kerry as not having the strength to stand up to terrorist attacks.
The survey of voters leaving the polls found that Mr. Bush did indeed enjoy a big advantage over Mr. Kerry on the issue of terrorism. But it also showed that a majority now believed that the war had gone badly off course, and had jeopardized the long-term security of the United States.
And while Mr. Bush was seen as much better able to protect the nation from terrorist attacks than Mr. Kerry was, the survey suggested that in the end, domestic issues like health care and job creation were critical factors in the choices of many Americans, and many of those voters were going to Mr. Kerry.
Both parties had identified get-out-the-vote efforts as critical to victory in an election where poll after poll showed Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush evenly matched. For Democrats, it was a matter of building on the anger still burning from 2000.
For Mr. Bush's chief strategist, Karl Rove, it was a matter of motivating what he said was four million evangelicals who had not been there for Mr.
Bush in 2000, and who would respond to a campaign appeal that was built to a large extent by trying to paint cultural differences with Mr. Kerry on such issues as gay marriage and abortion rights.
Mr. Rove appears to have had at least some success on that count. The surveys found that voters cited three issues as central in making their
decision: the economy, terrorism and moral issues, and Mr. Bush won among voters who cited moral issues.
