Is all politics local?

I got invited to a party to watch the returns in our town's elections last night - the first time I have ever attended such an event other than as a reporter.

At first, it showed all the excitement of a wake. These were Republicans in a town with 9,300 enrolled Democrats, 6,500 unenrolled and only 6,000 members of the the GOP. The Dems held every town office, to say nothing of control of our county, state and federal governments.

Thirty or 40 people gathered at a pizza joint to watch as the results were called in from polling places.

Shortly after the polls closed, the GOP candidate for the top town job of supervisor, Sam Messina, was talking about how the election wasn't the most important thing in his life, how it had been a great experience meeting people, etc., and all of the other things candidates expecting to lose say.

But from the beginning, something peculiar was happening. While all of the other local GOP candidates were taking their expected drubbing, Sam was hanging close to his Democratic incumbent opponent in early returns.

"We're at least going to give him a race,'' he said about 45 minutes after the polls closed and he was only slightly behind.

At the end, he pulled narrowly ahead, by about 130 votes out of about 9,000 cast. The final tally will be decided after about 400 absentees are counted, but typically absentees break about the same way votes cast on election day do, making it likely that Messina will be the next supervisor.

As the crowd erupted at the news, Messina climbed up on a chair, urging caution about the final results and thanking those who had helped him and pledging to work with his (apparently) vanquished foe. It was good he had something planned to say in case he won as well as the expected concession speech.

What happened? There were no exit polls to provide a clue. Maybe it's a tiny signal that the bloom is off the Barack Obama rose, as the results of the New Jersey and Virginia governor's races also seemed to indicate last night? Or did people pay enough attention so that his calls for lower spending and less partisanship actually resonated with enough voters to make the difference?

The unpredictability of politics is part of the fun. Sometimes voters are smarter than the pros give them credit for.