The bad news for Republicans is that half the American people voted for 285 new federal programs, billions in new taxes and the largest projected expansion of the federal budget since the Great Society. The Republicans' victory was barely achieved against a campaign that was badly run by a leader who was widely perceived to lack character and integrity, who was vice president in the most corrupt and disgraced administration in history and who himself broke election laws, lied to federal investigators and seemed compulsive in his inability to stay close to the facts.

The bad news is that half the nation voted for a party that is fierce in its defense of racial preferences and partial-birth abortions, and that is firm in its belief that the U.S. Constitution is an outdated and bigoted document that needs to be rewritten to accord with the party's own left-wing agendas. Thus, in a speech to "energize" his African-American base, Gore attacked Bush for promising he would appoint Supreme Court justices who adhered to the text of the Constitution. Said Gore: "I often think of the strictly constructionist meaning that was applied when the Constitution was written, how some people were considered three-fifths of a human being." Of course those people were slaves, not (as Gore implied) African-Americans as such; slavery is, of course, outlawed by the Constitution to which Bush was referring and the Three-Fifths Compromise was proposed by anti-slavery framers who wanted to diminish the electoral power of the slave-owning South.

Unfortunately, the negative lesson of the election result is one that many Republicans either do not understand or do not want to face. Two weeks before the vote, two of the brightest editors at the National Review criticized the strategy of "compassionate conservatism" with which Bush was challenging Democrats for the political center: "If Mr. Bush wins, it will not be because of his personality, compassionate or otherwise. It will be because America remains, in crucial respects, a conservative country that wants energetic conservative leaders."

This can hardly be the case in the sense the authors seem to mean it. Gore ran a campaign well to the left of the American political center -- too far to the left, according to liberal critics in his own party. If Americans were conservative in the authors' sense, they would have roundly rejected Gore's populist appeal.

The expectations of a comfortable margin that Republicans had going into the election were defeated by higher voter turnout than anyone predicted. The cause of this difference was a fact that Republicans better recognize: The days of Democratic complacency, which produced low turnout and made possible the 1994 Gingrich "revolution" and takeover of the House, also ended with that defeat. Having been taken by surprise and knocked off their perch, Democrats will not soon again make the mistake of taking victory for granted.

Until now, all Republican strategies -- whether of the left wing of the party or the right -- have depended on expectations of low voter turnout. Every election cycle, Republicans regularly pray for bad weather and hope that voter apathy will depress the Democrats' big-city turnouts. This election should provide a clear signal to Republicans that they can no longer lean on this crutch. Democratic complacency cannot be relied on to achieve their victories for them. If they don't aggressively woo new constituencies, they will remain a minority party.

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