Obama won here, but how?

Orange County Democratic Party officials recently crunched the November election numbers and they very much liked what they saw — enough so to predict that in two years the county could continue trending blue.

Republicans still hold about a 200,000-voter edge countywide, but there were some surprising results for Democrats when volunteers peered deeper into the numbers, particularly in Newport-Mesa.

For instance, President-elect Barack Obama beat Sen. John McCain in Costa Mesa, 52% to 45%, with 3% voting for other candidates. Obama nearly took the whole county, in fact, as McCain edged him 50.2% to 47.7% with the rest going to other candidates.

No Democratic presidential candidate has won Orange County since Franklin Delano Roosevelt beat Alfred Landon, in 1936.

What makes that surprising is 41% of registered Costa Mesa voters are Republicans, 31% are Democrats, and 28% are declined to state or belong to other parties.

And yet, half of Costa Mesa voters picked Rep. Dana Rohrabacher over the 44% who chose his Democratic challenger, Debbie Cook. That suggests a great deal of ballot-splitting.

It would appear Obama picked up substantial support from independents and Republicans to go with his base, and that his coattails weren’t nearly strong enough to help Cook. In Orange County, Rohrabacher beat Cook by about a 54%-to-42% margin while in the Los Angeles County precincts in the district the GOP incumbent defeated Cook by about 50% to 46%.

Overall, Rohrabacher won with 52.60% of the vote and Cook collected 43.10%. With a 44% to 32% registration advantage overall, that means Cook improved on that difference by 11 points.

Not bad, but not good enough for the former Huntington Beach mayor who, by the way, lost Huntington Beach to Rohrabacher by a 53% to 43% difference.

Rohrabacher’s campaign chairman Jim Righeimer was proud of his candidate’s showing against one of the strongest challenges he’s faced in many years, but he blamed slippage in the presidential race on a weak top of the ticket.

Many GOP leaders bragged during the election about how vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin electrified the ticket, locally and nationally, but that enthusiasm didn’t pay off on election day, Righeimer acknowledged.

“It got people fired up, but at the end of the day she wasn’t running for president,” Righeimer said. “Even though people might have felt McCain was the better of the two candidates running for president a lot of them didn’t feel McCain was all that much of a Republican.”

Besides, the Democrats had their own rock star, but he was topping the ticket, Righeimer said.

“You’ve got a positive, smart guy running for president, so some people were thinking — Do I vote for him or an older guy who’s not positive and not exciting,” Righeimer said. “It’s pretty hard to get excited about the lesser of two evils.”

Orange County Republican Party chairman Scott Baugh agreed.

“It was a horrible election year, and the nominee was not overly popular with the base so you had an outcome you wouldn’t expect in normal years,” Baugh said, shrugging off any suggestion of a blue trend in Orange County.

Obama also did relatively well in Newport Beach, even narrowly winning in Rep. John Campbell’s 48th Congressional District, according to Orange County Democratic Party volunteer Chris Stern, a data systems expert who spent days analyzing the results.

Overall in Newport, Obama picked up 40% of the vote to McCain’s 58%. That sounds like a thrashing, but consider that the difference in registrations between Republicans and Democrats is 56% to 22% with 22% independent or third-party voters.

Baugh cited one poll that indicated 17% of Newport Beach Republicans didn’t vote for McCain.

“That’s an indication that voters clearly wanted a change in direction, and John McCain was not that change,” he said.

Stern and Lindsay Hopkins, the Orange County Democrats’ political director, agree that Obama didn’t help much down the ticket, but that could change in the 2010 elections if Obama gets off to a good start.

“You could look at it as a problem,” Stern said of the smaller share of Democratic support further down the ticket in the state Senate and Assembly districts. “But we look at it as an opportunity.”

If the Democrats can successfully recruit stronger candidates and Obama is still popular in 2010, the party could make further inroads, they said.