Mitt Romney could have run a better campaign. He reacted slowly when Barack Obama defined him as a heartless plutocrat, and flip-flopped on policies so frequently that even campaign allies struggled to keep up. This was an election that maintained the balance of powers as they were, not a rout: if 65m American voters saw fit to hand Mr Obama a second term, fully 62m would have preferred not to sample Hope and Change, the sequel.

In congressional contests voters denied Mr Obama a mandate to pursue any more of the Democratic agenda, ensuring that he will only be able to propose laws that can pass both a House of Representatives that remains firmly in Republican hands and a Senate in which they will still wield the power of death-by-filibuster. Some Republican success, it is true, was down to recent shameless efforts to gerrymander the nation's congressional boundaries. But that does not fully account for their roughly 40-seat majority. Besides, 30 states now have Republican governors, though state borders cannot be gerrymandered.