Phila. area the key to Obama's win in Pa.

No offense to anyone in the rest of Pennsylvania, but it was always about Philadelphia and its suburbs.

Sen. John McCain knew it. That was why he and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, popped up in Wallingford and Media and Lafayette Hill and Pipersville and Villanova - and on and on.

In the end, there was nothing the Republican nominee could do to prevent a tidal wave of Philadelphia-area votes for Sen. Barack Obama from washing away his hopes of winning Pennsylvania.

"It came down to Southeastern Pennsylvania vs. the rest of the state - and that was it," said Robert A. Gleason Jr., the state Republican chairman.

McCain won 49 of the state's 67 counties. As he had hoped, he swept the guns-and-religion counties - many of them Democratic - outside the Pittsburgh area. In the mountains and in farming areas, he won by ratios of 2-1, even 3-1.

Yet Obama triumphed - and by a historic margin. No previous Democrat running for president had taken Pennsylvania with more than 51 percent of the vote since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Obama won with almost 55 percent, compared with a little more than 44 percent for McCain.

Obama's margin, statewide, was 600,000 votes. His margin just in the five-county Philadelphia area was 656,000. The match was over before the ball got kicked west of Valley Forge.

Obama got 1.3 million of his 3.2 million votes - 41 percent - in the Philadelphia area. He also won several outlying counties covered by the millions of dollars in TV ads that he ran on Philadelphia stations. These included Berks and the three counties of the Lehigh Valley.

"The basic [Obama] strategy was to dominate in Philadelphia and run up a margin sufficient to carry the rest of the state," said David L. Cohen, a top Democratic insider. "There just aren't enough votes in the rest of the state to catch up."

It wasn't always this way. Up until the 1990s, Democrats needed to win Western Pennsylvania to have a chance of victory statewide. The Philadelphia region took on dominance only when the suburbs also began to vote Democratic for president, starting with Bill Clinton's elections in 1992 and 1996.

Obama's victory was built on a 459,000-vote margin in the city and a 197,000-vote edge in the suburbs.

Both were big improvements for Democrats over the last presidential election. In 2004, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry won Philadelphia by 412,000 votes and the suburbs by 87,000 votes.

Chester County, the last time, remained a GOP holdout. This time, it joined Montgomery, Bucks and Delaware Counties in going solidly Democratic.

The vote margin in Montgomery County, once the GOP's strongest Pennsylvania bastion, was an astonishing 69-39 for Obama.

Marcel Groen, the county party chairman, said that Obama had created "a tremendous amount of excitement" among both Democrats and independents.

This energy fueled what Groen said was a superior Obama field organization.

"He had eight offices in the county manned by hundreds of people," Groen said. "You'd drive by the McCain headquarters and they'd have one person sitting inside."

Gleason said he knew that for McCain to have a chance, he needed to do more than undercut Obama's strength in the suburbs. He also had to make inroads in Philadelphia, where black voters were fired up for Obama.

The Republican strategy was to appeal to working-class whites in about 17 of the city's 66 wards. The GOP hoped it could actually win five to seven of them. In the end, it got only one - the 26th Ward in South Philadelphia.

"We thought we'd get more votes for John McCain," said city GOP leader Michael Meehan. "We thought he would outperform President Bush [in 2004]. He did not. It's probably based more on the economy than anything else."

In Meehan's own ward - the 58th in the Far Northeast - Democrats outnumber Republicans, 2-1. That isn't all that bad in a city where, overall, the Democrats are on top by 6-1.

McCain did relatively well in the 58th Ward. He lost there, but by a fraction of the registration margin.

"It wasn't enough," Meehan said.

Pennsylvania now has voted Democratic in each of the last five presidential elections. The question is, will it continue to be seen as a swing state - colored purple on electoral maps - or will it be considered solidly blue, like New Jersey and Maryland?

Leaders on both sides said that could become so. But it's too early to tell. The answer may depend on who the candidates are in the next election, in 2012.

"There's no such thing as permanent in politics," Cohen said. "But I think in national elections, we're pretty blue right now."

Gleason said that although he was discouraged by the trend in Pennsylvania, he believed that a Republican could still win in the state - if he or she appealed to the Philadelphia region.

"Will we ever be considered a swing state by another presidential candidate? Yeah, I think it's possible," Gleason said. "But [the GOP] has a lot of work to do in the next four years."