It is worth being moved that in our huge, restive, cynical and yearning nation we peacefully, and with complete public acceptance of the outcome, made a dramatic national judgment this week. Just about every adult citizen took part and took it seriously. All together they produced something we needed: a clear outcome, one delivered without charges of large-scale chicanery or even small-scale so far as we know. There will be a peaceful transfer of power. A lot of people had to do a lot of things right to make this happen.

It was a triumph for the Republican Party—a sweep, a rout—and a disaster for the Democrats. Much has been written about the demographic facts but when a single candidate increases his totals in almost every group but one, white women, something big happened. Donald Trump will receive a majority of the popular vote—the first Republican to do so since 2004. Republicans handily won the Senate and are poised to take the House. This amounts to a legitimately claimed mandate.

Mr. Trump’s is the biggest political comeback since Richard Nixon, whose career flat-lined in embarrassment in 1962, after a failed gubernatorial race and stumbling news conference—“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”—only to roar back to the presidency in 1968. It isn’t enough said that Mr. Trump did this while enduring a shooting, a second, thwarted assassination attempt, and credible intelligence reports that Iran was trying to kill him. He went into all his rallies knowing that. He showed a lot of guts. Mass media didn’t dwell on this, but regular people did.

As for Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump in 2020 lost the Catholic vote. This year he carried it with a healthy 56%. That’ll teach her to blow off the Al Smith dinner.

What did it all mean? The people did what they wished. They revolted. They looked at the past four years of Washington and said no. They said “Goodbye to all that,” to the years 2020-24—to the pandemic, to the pain and damage of that era, which affected every part of our lives. That is the real turning of the page I think, from a time they hated that made them view their government as bullying and not that bright. In terms of issues it was illegal immigration, inflation and a rejection of the deterioration all around them—of drugstores locking up the shampoo and the beleaguered Walgreens employee late with the key to the cabinet and in a bad mood because he’s afraid of thieves and crazy people and it’s wearing him down. It was the woke regime, which people have come to experience as an invading force in their lives. It was Afghanistan, and other wars, and the sense Washington isn’t getting foreign policy right and perhaps barely thinking about it. They just seem to be staggering through each day. The country’s been waiting for years to hear from its leaders: What are America’s interests?

In September, pondering the race, I wrote: “This will be a path election, not a person election.” Once we chose a shining John F. Kennedy, who would choose the path. You chose dazzling Ronald Reagan, and he’d cut a path through the forest. This year I felt people would be choosing a path, not a person. “And I’m not sure they want to go down the Blue Path any deeper than they already have.”

I think that’s what happened. Millions of people who didn’t like Donald Trump voted for the path he promised.

America, after its long journey through the 2010s and ’20s, is becoming more conservative again.

This was all much bigger than “what Kamala Harris got wrong.” We know what she got wrong. She was a poor candidate chosen in mysterious circumstances who, like her running mate, was a strong regional and local talent but not a national one. She was a California progressive who came to be perceived as such.

The Democratic Party just took it full in the face—rejected and rebuked. That party needs an intellectual autopsy, an audit of its beliefs; it needs a rising moderating force such as the Democratic Leadership Council of the 1980s and ’90s, which got the party off McGovernism and its losses and on to Clintonism and its victories.

What are the Democrats? What’s that party for? When I was a kid they were the party of the working man, the little guy. That’s the Trumpian GOP now. When I was a young woman they were the antiwar party. That’s the Trumpian GOP. The party of generous spending? The Trumpian party says hold my beer. What belief do the Democrats hold that distinguishes them? LGBTQ, woke, gender theory, teachers unions, higher taxes? Why not throw in cholera and chlamydia?

The party has lost its specific character and nature; it’s no longer a thing you can name. Democrats have to sit down with a yellow legal pad and figure themselves out. All defeat carries a gift: You get to figure out what you’re getting wrong.

As for the Republicans, we always feel now we’re picking a government to manage our decline. But when Mr. Trump met with the Journal’s editors last month, he spoke for a moment with excitement about how America “can be so rich and so successful.” He described watching the arms come out and catch the SpaceX rocket. “It was good old Elon. It was him, he’s amazing.”

That chord he was trying to hit—and tried to hit in late rallies—is one America yearns to hear. They want the old sense that their kids are being launched into a society and culture that’s healthy and vital. Exuberance, expansion, Musk to Mars, drill, baby, drill—we’re going to be exciting again! Then Mr. Trump would revert to American carnage. But in a funny way, almost in spite of himself, I think he communicated what he meant, I think he got the Dream Big vote, and he should continue it as a centerpiece.

As for me,  I will pray for him, support what I think constructive and oppose what I think destructive, call it straight as I can and take whatever follows. As someone once said, the real story of American life is where you stand and the price you’ll pay to stand there.

I like what Liz Cheney surprisingly tweeted Wednesday: “Our nation’s democratic system functioned last night and we have a new President-elect. All Americans are bound, whether we like the outcome or not, to accept the results.” We also have a responsibility as members of “the greatest nation on earth” to “support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years.” She singled out the courts, the press, “and those serving in our federal, state and local governments” to be “the guardrails of democracy.”

Just so. God bless America - Onward.