WITH EXIT POLLS telling them John Kerry was going to win, Dick Harpootlian, Rep. James Smith and Mayor Bob Coble chartered a flight up to Boston Tuesday to be there for the victory party.

“I’ll never believe another exit poll in my life,” Rep. Smith said. “We had Fred Yang on the phone” and other pollsters from Republican Frank Luntz to Zogby saying Kerry was winning it when they flew up.

Mr. Harpootlian downplays that, saying he just wanted to be there, win or lose. “If politics is your hobby,” it was the place to be. He said the place was packed with celebrities, “from the Heinz kid to Christie Brinkley to Kevin Dillon.” (Mr. Smith disputes that, saying it was Kevin Bacon and Matt Dillon.) Did Ms. Brinkley still look good? “Oh ... yeah,” he said fervently. “And Alan Dershowitz still looks bad.”

They were at a fairly small “friends and family party,” as Mr. Smith describes it, and it was really something to be there and ride the roller coaster “from the height of absolutely just knowing we were going to win to the depths of ... ,” and he trailed off.

“Then we just came back,” he said. On the way, they had plenty of time to discuss what went wrong for the Democrats in this presidential election.

Maybe it was having just been among all the celebs, but Mr. Smith said the main hope for the future for the Democratic Party nationally lies in “not being the party of New York and California any more,” and finding a way to speak to the rest of the country. “Democrats locally know how to do that,” and the national party needs to learn how, too, he said.

Mr. Harpootlian says the Democrats’ mistake was relying on a message of “Bush is a bad guy and he’s not very smart.” That was a lousy strategy.

The impression he thinks the public got was that “Bush is kind of like the friendly family doctor, and Kerry is the aloof brain surgeon who scares the crap out of you when he gives you the message and you find out this guy’s going to be cutting on you.”

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Katon Dawson, chairman of the S.C. Republican Party, has an analysis that at least in part doesn’t differ all that much from that of his former counterpart: “People trusted George Bush and they didn’t understand Kerry’s message.” (Or, as Mr. Harpootlian put it, “What message?”)

Message wasn’t everything, though, certainly not in South Carolina. “I attribute it to our message and our organization.” And the organization for winning the U.S. Senate seat as well as the presidency, as he describes it, was fairly awesome.

There were two million pieces of mail sent out, and in keeping with the law, every one was stamped by hand by volunteers.

There were 400,000 volunteer phone calls. Not those irritating recordings, but live ones, with real people saying “I’m your neighbor” and asking folks to get out and vote for the GOP ticket.

All told, $1.2 million was spent on the get-out-the-vote effort, from mail to phone calls to buying lunches for the volunteers.

He maintains that this effort was helped by the fact that it was not matched by the opposition. “We didn’t see the Democrats at all” in the last couple of weeks, he said. “It was like playing on a field where there was no other team.”

So what’s next for S.C. Republicans? “We’re working right now to re-elect our governor.” He said the reason the GOP won the U.S. Senate race was because they started preparing to win it as soon as the 2000 election was over — even though they didn’t know yet who their nominee would be.

Well, this time they know who their nominee for governor will be in two years. And although Mr. Dawson isn’t afraid of the potential opposition, which he says scuttlebutt describes as “Tommy Moore and the mayor of somewhere and Bob Coble,” the state GOP is already gearing up to roll right over whomever it is.

He didn’t mention Inez Tenenbaum as a potential candidate, but I did, to which he said, “We would love the chance to run against her again.”

I asked whether he was sure the party was unified behind the governor, given his significant differences with some key Republican lawmakers. He waved that aside, and made it clear that one thing was for sure: “Katon Dawson’s for Mark Sanford.”

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The governor called me Friday just as I was writing the above, and I took the occasion to ask how he felt about having worked to elect Ken Wingate to the Senate — even to the extent of going door-to-door — only to see his friend and ally solidly beaten by Joel Lourie.

I had been talking with Richland County GOP chairman Shell Suber about that race earlier, and his explanation was that “Joel’s a whale of a good candidate.” Of course, so was Mr. Wingate, “the only person I’ve known in quite a while willing to work as hard” to get elected as Mr. Lourie. But that wasn’t enough to overcome Mr. Lourie’s six years of representing much of the district in the House.

The governor saw it as part of a larger trend. “DeMint got walloped by Tenenbaum in the better part of that district,” he said, adding that Kerry did the same to Bush in those precincts. In the end, he said, “Everything is possible in politics, but not everything is probable in politics.”

Of course, that wasn’t the only race the governor got involved in. And of Mr. Lourie, he wanted it noted that “I never spoke ill once of him or any other candidate ... except Phil Leventis.”

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A postscript: Wasn’t that a bust of John Adams behind John Kerry when he delivered his gracious concession speech? If so, nothing could be more fitting. If the nation could survive the hateful campaign of 1800, surely we can come together and put this one behind us.

Write to Mr. Warthen at bwarthen@thestate.com.