NEW YORK CITY (By Adam Nagourney, NYTimes) January 2, 2004 - With the exception of a few Democratic outliers in Ohio, few people dispute that the election for president is done and decided: President Bush won and John Kerry lost.

But as the new year begins, no such consensus exists among Democrats about why Mr. Kerry was defeated, and the party is locked in a battle of interpretation over just what went wrong. Was it values? Terrorism and Iraq? A better Republican get-out-the-vote operation or a rush of Hispanics to President Bush? A gawky candidate with little to say?

Presidential elections often produce a clear story line, a lesson for winners and losers alike. Not this one, at least not yet, and that is a matter of increasing concern for Democrats who would like to learn from the past as they face a series of critical decisions, including picking a new party chairman and laying out a plan to avoid even more losses in the 2006 Congressional races. And there is the immediate tactical question of how stridently to push back against Mr. Bush's efforts to change Social Security and the tax code.

It's hardly any wonder that Democrats these days seem to be marching in so many different directions. Post-loss squabbling between the party's left wing and its moderate faction is nothing new.

But the very ambiguity of the 2004 election results has pushed the party into new sets of arguments, the resolution of which could have far-reaching implications for the next class of Democratic candidates for Congress and the next presidential election. For example, did Democrats lose because they were seen as lax on "values," which was the early verdict on the Kerry loss, or because they were seen as weak on terrorism?

The confusion, in part, is a result of the hasty - and often flawed - analyses that have come to mark politics in the age of the Internet and nonstop news cycles. The urge to explain immediately why Mr. Kerry lost was aggravated by what many pollsters viewed as flawed exit polling that led analysts initially to overstate factors like the role of values and the number of Hispanic voters who fled Mr. Kerry for Mr. Bush.

"We all have come up with our individual thoughts, but as far as coalescing on what happened - I don't think there's been a determination about what really happened," said Harry Reid, the new Senate Democratic leader. "It's not that easy to figure out."

Presumably, this will all be figured out in time. But for now, uncertainty is fueling the Democrats' angst as they trek again through the electoral desert.

The so-called values issue was the first widely-used explanation for Mr. Kerry's loss, after 22 percent of respondents in exit polls listed "values" as the main factor in their presidential votes. For a while after Election Day, it was rare to hear a Democrat talking without hearing a mention of God, church or the need for the party to learn how to talk about abortion rights and gay marriage.

Joe Manchin, the new governor of West Virginia, a Democrat whose anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-gun-control views lifted him to a double-digit victory even as Mr. Kerry lost his state by 13 points, said last week that he had little doubt about why Democrats lost the presidency and seats in the House and Senate.

"It's the values - my goodness, it's the values," he said, adding: "But to allow any other party to say that the Democrats aren't for family values, they are not for people who go to church, they are not for people who like to go hunting - that's wrong. For the Democrats to sit back and allow that to happen, is even more wrong."

But the importance of values is disputed by more than a few Democrats, who obviously would prefer not to follow a plan that might irritate some fairly crucial parts of the base, be they secular Democrats, abortion rights advocates or supporters of gay marriage.

"Values obviously are important," said Terry McAuliffe, the national Democratic party chairman, whose term expires in February. "But clearly, the overriding issue in this election was terrorism and national security. You don't get to those other issues until you have checked the box on national security."

Timothy J. Roemer, a moderate former Indiana congressman running to be Democratic chair, said: "We did not have a very compelling message about how to make Americans feel safer in a post 9/11 world. The message was more about Iraq, where our base voter was, than it was about talking through how, for instance, Truman and President Kennedy made Americans feel safe in the Cold War."

Senator Charles E. Schumer, the new head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, argued that the problem this year was broader than issues like terrorism or values, saying that Democrats never laid out a program of what they would do should they win the White House.

"You could describe George Bush's overall campaign message and theme in eight words: 'War in Iraq, tax cuts, no gay marriage,' " Mr. Schumer said. "And these weren't just slogans. For better or for worse, he tried to implement all three. And the challenge for Democrats - we don't have to do it in eight words - but we have to have a succinct program - not just slogans, like better health."

And there's more. Mr. Reid said Mr. Kerry lost in large part because he did not spend enough time campaigning for rural voters. "We got crushed in rural Nevada," he said.

Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, said that Democrats, despite their best efforts, had been outgunned on voter turnout by Republicans and that they didn't push back hard enough against what she described as false attacks.

"I don't subscribe to any of these notions that we have to examine our conscience as to who we are," Ms. Pelosi said. "We know who we are. We know what we stand for. We'll make it clearer in the non-presidential election year what the differences are between the Democrats and the Republicans."

For all the clutter and clatter, interviews this week suggest that the outlines of a consensus may be emerging among Democrats and Republicans on why the election turned out the way it did, aided by the passage of time and additional studies and polling.

Fittingly enough, this consensus would bring everything back full circle to what both parties were saying a year ago in trying to predict the outcome of the race.

This was, the argument goes, an election shaped by the fears and memories of Sept. 11, and memories of Mr. Bush's steely performance in the days after the attacks. Voters were averse to changing presidents in what was effectively a time of war - and Mr. Kerry, never a particularly likable candidate, never gave them a reason to do it.