But politicians of all stripes certainly sat up and took notice on election night when the presidential tallies rolled into the county courthouse complex on Lancaster's North Duke Street.

Among 67 counties in Pennsylvania, Lancaster was the place where, percentage-wise, the Democrats made their biggest top-of-the-ticket gains compared with 2004.

Analysts said that was partly due to population changes in the fast-growing Pennsylvania Dutch region, partly due to voter alienation from President Bush (even among hard-core Republicans), and partly due to Sen. Barack Obama's persistent efforts to woo the county, which he visited three times.

Though Sen. John McCain won with 55.6 percent of the vote, Obama - branded by his foe as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate - got 43.5 percent.

That's no big deal, you say. Well, consider that Sen. John Kerry got just 33.6 percent in 2004, that Vice President Al Gore got just 31.4 percent in 2000, and that President Bill Clinton got just 34.6 percent in 1996.

Obama's 10-point improvement over Kerry's performance may be yet another signal that a bigger, wealthier and better-educated Lancaster County slowly is being drawn into the long arms of metropolitan areas to the east and south - not just Philadelphia, but also Baltimore and Washington.

"Lancaster County is one of the fastest-growing counties in the state," said Bruce Beardsley, the county Democratic chairman. "People are moving in from the Philadelphia region - even from New Jersey. They're younger and more professional, and that's the Democratic demographic."

Much the same kind of change is happening in other areas of south-central Pennsylvania beyond the wide arc of the Philadelphia region. Berks, Lebanon, Dauphin and York were among the top eight counties in the state where Obama outperformed Kerry in the percent of total votes.

According to an old issue of the Almanac of American Politics, Lancaster County delivered the highest vote percentage for Richard M. Nixon in 1972 - 76 percent - of any part of the eastern United States.

Gil Delaney, retired politics writer for the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, said that before Obama, no Democratic presidential nominee had visited the county since John F. Kennedy in 1960.

The last Democrat to carry Lancaster County was Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Delaney, who attended an Obama rally at Lancaster's Buchanan Park on Sept. 4, said, "It was the biggest rally I had ever seen. It was bigger than Ronald Reagan in 1984. . . . I couldn't believe it."

But Delaney, who covered politics for 31 years, cautioned against seeing a strong trend in Obama's respectable showing.

Outside of the city of Lancaster, Democrats are a long way from having much, if any, local power. And in other statewide races this year, Lancaster County delivered its usual overwhelming majorities for the GOP.

Delaney gave much of the credit for Obama's showing to his singular field organization, which registered thousands of new voters and knocked on doors all over on Election Day.

"It was a human-wave assault," he said.

James F. Bednar, a former county Republican chairman, conceded that "the Democrats are closing the gap," at least in urban areas.

"The hard-core Republican areas out in the hinterlands remain 6-1 or 7-1," he said. "But there are pockets of Democratic growth in Lancaster County, with people moving in from bedroom communities of Philadelphia and Maryland."

Lancaster County, which has grown 38 percent in population since 1980, has 21,950 more registered Democrats today than in 2004, according to new state data. The number of Republicans has declined by 8,673 over the same period.

Berwood Yost, director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, said voter anger with Bush clearly hurt McCain. In 2012, it will be Obama's record on trial. Lancaster County could swing more Republican.

But population trends are likely irreversible.

"By want of growth, Lancaster County will continue to change demographically," Yost said. "And those changes, I think, will tend to move us toward more competitive politics."