The dust continues to settle less than a week after a presidential election that managed to be both a nail-biter and a landslide. No easy task, but then anything is possible in politics.

George W. Bush's victory by more than 3.5 million votes overall qualifies as among the most decisive presidential triumphs in history — and yet, if he hadn't won by 136,483 votes out of nearly 5.5 million cast in the state of Ohio, Democrat John Kerry would have won the electoral vote and as we speak would be giving moving vans directions to Pennsylvania Avenue.

In trying to figure how Bush managed to score such a significant national mandate after starting a war with an Iraqi dictator who it turned out had no teeth, and who even managed to get a W in Ohio, a state that lost more jobs the last four years than Saddam Hussein's relatives, I followed my old sports writer habits and went to the stats.

What I discovered is evidence to suggest that Bush owes a big thank-you to the burgeoning debate over the definition of marriage.

National exit polls revealed that the No. 1 issue that brought out over 115 million voters nationwide — about 14 million more than four years ago — was moral values, and that the chief moral values question was whether marriage should be defined only as an institution between one man and one woman.

Eleven states had so-called Defense of Marriage Acts on their ballots as state constitutional amendments preserving man-woman unions as sacrosanct. In each of these states — including Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah — not only was voter turnout significantly higher than in 2000, but Bush's percentage of the vote went up in each one. Even in Michigan and Oregon, the two states among the 11 not carried by Bush, he did better than four years ago.

Nowhere was the upsurge more dramatic than in Oklahoma, where four years ago 1.2 million Oklahomans gave Bush 60 percent of the vote. This year, 1.5 million gave Bush 66 percent of the vote while passing their marriage amendment by 76 percent.

Each of the 11 marriage amendments was passed, in most cases overwhelmingly. Mississippi was highest at 86 percent, followed by Oklahoma and Georgia at 76 percent, Arkansas and Kentucky at 75 percent, North Dakota at 73 percent, Montana at 67 percent, Utah at 66 percent, Ohio at 62 percent, Michigan at 59 percent and Oregon at 57 percent.

Only in Utah, where the Bush ticket won 71 percent approval, did the president do better than the amendment.

It is safe to say that traditional man-woman marriage is more popular in America than the president who supports it.

Of course the most significant state race in 2004 when it came to deciding the presidency was in Ohio, where 20 electoral votes were at stake in a place that since 2000, when Bush narrowly won with 50 percent of the vote, has endured four years of economic downturn. Last Tuesday, nearly a million more Ohioans voted compared to four years ago, and while the margin was still slim, this time Bush won with 51 percent of the vote. And with it the White House.

What does it all mean? My guess is that it means that Utah isn't the only place in the United States of America where defining marriage, and the battle for the traditional family, is the real front lines. Evidence suggests that Bush, who was dead wrong about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, more than balanced that scale by siding with the majority of Americans who would like marriage to stay between a man and a woman.

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Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.