Many independent polls had predicted for weeks that former Attorney General Bob McDonnell (R) would beat Democrat Creigh Deeds in the Virginia’s gubernatorial election Nov. 3.

But few local Republican activists expected McDonnell to carry Fairfax County.

“Honestly? No, I did not think this would happen. We had planned as if [McDonnell could win Fairfax] but realistically I didn’t think it would happen,” said Anthony Bedell, chairman of the Fairfax County Republican Committee, when asked about statewide campaign’s local success on election night.

The new governor-elect beat Deeds by 4,529 votes in Fairfax, managing to collect just over 50 percent of the vote countywide. Fairfax County is Virginia’s most populous locality and home to about 12 percent of all registered voters in the Commonwealth.

Over the past nine years, only three Republican candidates, including McDonnell, have managed to beat a Democratic opponent on countywide level in Fairfax. By contrast, 17 Republican candidates have lost to Democrats on a countywide level in Fairfax during the same time period.

Still, the Republican base was more energized this year than they have been in several election cycles, said many party volunteers.

“The feel this year is a lot like when my husband won in 1993 and Clinton was in the White House,” said Susan Allen, wife of former governor and U.S. Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), as she campaigned outside her local polling place at Stratford Landing Elementary School.

And even before the local polling stations reported their totals, at least one local elected official was confident about McDonnell’s ability to win Fairfax County.

“Yes, I definitely think Bob could win Fairfax,” said Supervisor Patrick Herrity (R-Springfield), as he waited for the election returns after the polls closed.

AS FAIRFAX residents have grown to become such a large part of Virginia’s overall voter pool, statewide campaigns have found it harder to ignore the locality, like some more ideologically conservative Republican operations had done in the past, according to several local elected officials from both sides of the aisle.

Political observers from both parties agree that the Republican Party cannot simply hope to balance out the votes potentially lost in Fairfax by driving up participation in more reliably right-leaning parts of Virginia as they sometimes did in the past.

In fact, U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-11) has said that a statewide candidate who manages to win Fairfax County by approximately 65,000 votes is nearly impossible to defeat in a Virginia statewide election. The congressman has credited Fairfax, for example, with electing U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D), who defeated incumbent George Allen (R) by double digits in the county tally, despite winning the election statewide by less than a percentage point.

President Barack Obama’s campaign recognized the importance of Fairfax during his 2008 race, since the national campaign invested in 10 field directors for the county alone.

IN AN INTERVIEW last spring, McDonnell said that he planned to campaign far more aggressively in Fairfax than the Republican had in his 2005 campaign. Four years ago, McDonnell barely won the attorney general race, defeating Deeds by fewer than 350 votes statewide and losing Fairfax by approximately 41,500 votes.

“I am going to make sure people know that I am the original Fairfax resident. I am going to spend a lot of time up here next fall. I have been here a lot already,” said McDonnell in the spring. The Republican grew up in the Mount Vernon area, and attended high school in the City of Alexandria.

U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-10) said McDonnell may have appealed more to Northern Virginia residents than previous candidates because of his roots in the area.

“He was raised in Northern Virginia. When people talk about I-66, he knows where that is and he talked about the issues that matter to people up here,” said Wolf.

Still, Fairfax County Republicans employed a strategy that appeared to presume Deeds would carry the county, regardless of whether McDonnell won the overall statewide race.

Over the past few months, Bedell often talked of “squeezing the margins” of the Republican vote in Fairfax County by energizing and motivating as many conservative voters as possible. In other words, trying to keep the assumed margin of Democratic victory to as little as possible.

“The Republicans are tired of getting pushed around in Fairfax. We are going to compete in precincts that where Republicans haven’t competed in a long time. We want to energize people,” said Bedell at the Republican Party of Virginia’s convention last spring.

On election night, Bedell also said: “We competed everywhere in Fairfax and that hasn’t always been the strategy. I think our local delegate races helped the top of the ticket because you had local campaigns operating all over.”

STILL, McDonnell performed better in other parts of the commonwealth than Fairfax, winning with 58.6 percent of the vote statewide. And McDonnell’s two other Republican statewide candidates did not perform as well as he did in the election, particularly in Fairfax.

Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (R), who was seeking his second term, defeated Democrat Jody Wagner, a former cabinet member of Mark Warner’s, with 56.51 percent of the vote. But Wagner beat Bolling 51.5 percent to 48.4 percent in Fairfax, receiving about 8,000 more votes the Republican countywide.

State Sen. Ken Cuccinelli (R-37) earned 57.52 percent of the vote in Virginia to win the Attorney General race and performed better than Bolling did statewide. But Cuccinelli, who represented southwestern Fairfax in the General Assembly, lost by a larger margin to a Democrat than Bolling did in the county.

Those Republican campaigns that performed well in Fairfax on a countywide level have also been few and far between.

In 2000, former President George W. Bush (R) was successful in winning over Fairfax voters overall but it was by less than two percentage points. It wasn’t until seven years later that another Republican won a countywide race, when Clerk of Court John Frey (R) retained his elected position by a margin of 1,700 votes. Then, this week in 2009, McDonnell took Fairfax.

Frey, an incumbent, was hardly competing in a high profile contest two years ago. On the 2007 ballot, the clerk of court race shared space with elections for supervisor, county chairman, School Board, House of Delegates, State Senate, commonwealth’s attorney, sheriff, the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation Board and a school bond proposal.

That particular election cycle, which comes every four years, is also referred to as an “off-off election” because so few voters show up to participate, given that no federal or statewide race appears at the top of the ticket.

It is not clear whether McDonnell’s success this year in Fairfax will have any bearing on next year’s local congressional contests.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly’s 11th Congressional District favored McDonnell by a margin of 55 percent, Bolling by a margin of 52 percent and Cuccinelli by a margin of 52 percent in this election cycle. But Bedell is cautious to draw conclusions about what relevance results from one election might have on another.

“I think we learned from last year and this year that you can’t tell what is going to happen from one election to the next. They don’t necessarily connect,” he said.