A clear victor has emerged in the Republican war on women. Women.

With women breaking strongly for President Barack Obama and a banner year for women candidates, one thing is clear: the 2012 election is a mandate for women's equality and reproductive rights.

Let's first take a look at the presidential vote. In a year when women's issues were hotly debated and Democrats touted their pro-women principles, women favored Obama by 11 points. The president also benefited from an 11-point gender gap and women's higher turnout. Making up 53% of the electorate, according to preliminary results, women accounted for the lion's share of Obama's current 2.5 million vote lead. Obama racked up astoundingly large margins among several subgroups: single women went for him by a 36-point margin, Latinas by a 51-point margin. Despite the Romney campaign's insistence that women would break for him on the economy, Obama's support among women overall was nearly identical with his showing in the historic 2008 election.

Women's rights likewise played a starring role in one of last night's unanticipated headlines. Twenty women, a record number, are likely headed to the US Senate. All but one are pro-choice Democrats who campaigned, as well, as feminists. The story in the US House of Representatives was similar, if not quite as spectacular. These female candidates were lifted to victory by women's disgust at Republican attacks on women, which was then channeled by women-focused political action committees, such as Emily's List, Women Vote, and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, into successful and well-funded campaigns.

Women's pro-Democratic leanings were particularly apparent in states with high-profile women candidates supported by these PACs. In Wisconsin, for example, Tammy Baldwin won women by a 17-point margin to became the first openly lesbian woman elected to the US Senate. Baldwin defeated former three-term governor and Bush cabinet secretary Tommy Thompson, who did nothing to endear himself with the ladies when he explained that he became a lobbyist because "my wife likes to shop, OK?"

Although exit polls show that the economy was the No 1 issue for voters, pre-election surveys provide strong evidence that women's issues were also on their minds. In the final NBC/ Wall Street Journal survey, likely voters rated Obama better than Romney at "dealing with issues of concern to women" by 24 points. Four out of ten swing-state women ranked abortion as their No 1 issue, according to an October Gallup poll, and among them, Obama held a three-to-one advantage.

Not only did women voters positively affirm their support for pro-women's rights candidates and policies, they also rebuked the GOP for its multi-pronged assault on women's rights. Down ballot and state contests offered more proof that the 2012 elections were a mandate for women's rights. New Hampshire's Tea Party standard-bearer, Ovide Lamontagne, a far-right Republican opponent of abortion and the state's gay marriage law, admitted just a few weeks ago that he opposed equal pay laws. Democrat Maggie Hassan won the governor's office with a 22-point margin among women.

Republicans can chalk up their failure to win control of the Senate to their abundance of clueless and loquacious gray-faced men: Todd "legitimate rape" Akin and Richard Mourdock, who seemed to think that God plays wingman for rapists, both lost races they would have won but for speaking out of church about their true beliefs on women and rape. The lesson here is that even in quite conservative states, voters reject anti-woman extremists.

The Republican party would do well to heed the message and take stock of its unpopular assault on women's rights. Consider what might have been had Romney "Etch-a-Sketched" sooner to close his gender gap – if he had said, "heck yes, I support equal pay for women," instead of rhapsodizing about "binders full of women"; if he had condemned Rush Limbaugh's attacks on Sandra Fluke; or if he'd stayed out of the GOP's birth control panic or not cut ads for Mourdock.

Instead, the morning-after mandate denialism has already begun. It was Sandy. It was Christie. It was robotic Mitt.

Don't fall for it. Women earned this victory. And we intend to claim it.