[Updated]

Nothing tonight broke Mitt Romney’s way—or, in most cases, the Republican Party’s. It now looks like a rebuke. Early on, Obama won Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Michigan, Wisconsin—the last two of those are the home states of, respectively, Romney and his running mate. At 10 P.M., Florida and Virginia hadn’t been called, that they were too close to call said nothing good about Romney’s prospects. Ohio seemed to have more to do with what a mess the voting-day procedures were there than with either candidate’s chances. But no matter: after a period of intense obsession with Ohio, in which President Obama, only half joking, promised Ohioans chocolate, the evening sped toward a scenario in which Ohio, for electoral purposes, would not even matter. The networks called it for Obama, and called it early.

[#image: /photos/5909543d6552fa0be682ca2a]

At 10:15, CNN’s John King had already looked at his magic wall and said “I’m having a really hard time” working out Romney’s path to victory. About that time, it became clear that the Democrats would hold on to the Senate. (The Republicans, in some solace for them, will hold on to the House.) Around midnight, the scenario laid out in Cassidy’s Count—three hundred and three electoral votes for Barack Obama—had been realized, without Florida even being called. Sasha and Malia won’t have to switch schools, at least for four more years.

There was more. Elizabeth Warren won a Senate seat in Massachusetts; the G.O.P. had tried to make her not only a defeated woman but also a hated one. Richard Mourdock was defeated, too. Even before he started talking about God’s will being known in pregnancies resulting from rape, he had been an exemplar of the way that the Republican party had been destroying itself by embracing extremism and extreme candidates. Wisconsin, in addition to giving its electoral votes to Obama, elected America’s first openly lesbian senator, Tammy Baldwin. It did so in part thanks to get out the vote forces mobilized in a fight over unions. Tim Kaine, the Democrat, won in Virginia; so did Sherrod Brown, in another contested (and very, very expensive) race, in Ohio. In all four states where same-sex marriage was on the ballot, the marriage-equality side won.

All of that can not simply be explained by Republican muttering about “demographics”—talk about the increasing number of Hispanic voters, about minority allegiance to Barack Obama. This is not about identity politics, unless the future is an identity.

One argument now will be about which aspect of the Republican party’s agenda hurt it the most—that having to do with women, taxes, social programs, or inequality. We now have an answer about the Presidential race—about the choice between two men—before midnight, for a race that some thought could be headed for a recount. Mitt Romney, the flawed, flopping candidate, who never learned to talk about his own wealth or anyone else’s poverty, appears to have been rejected. But so was his party. We have had an intense debate about politics in the last few months—about policies, about priorities, about death and taxes. How that turned out is what we’re learning the most about tonight.

Photograph by Chip Litherland.