Delaware

State Highlights

“Be encouraged — we have won!” Christine O’Donnell shouted to supporters in an upbeat concession speech on Tuesday night.

Not quite. In fact, Ms. O’Donnell was one of relatively few Republican candidates to be decidedly beaten in the midterm elections. Still, she insisted, “Our voices were heard,” and politics in Delaware and the Republican Party “will never be the same.”

Why did Chris Coons, the New Castle County executive, win when so many Democrats lost? Ms. O’Donnell, like Glen Urquhart, the Republican with Tea Party support who lost the race for the House of Representatives to John C. Carney Jr, lacked crucial support in the northern part of the tiny state, said David C. Wilson, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Delaware. The state has just three counties, he explained, and one of them, New Castle, in the north, is the most populous and is heavily Democratic. So even though Ms. O’Donnell won the primary against a mainstream Republican candidate, Michael N. Castle, when it came to the general election, positions that won points with the Tea Party movement — along with Ms. O’Donnell’s propensity for seemingly bizarre statements — cost her widespread support in a county where the middle still matters. “In order for the Republicans to make inroads in the electorate, they have to win that county,” he said.

Surveys of voters at polling sites on Tuesday suggested that had Mr. Castle been the Republican candidate the race would have been nearly even, with 45 percent of the vote for Mr. Castle and 44 percent for Mr. Coons. The surveys also showed that Sarah Palin’s enthusiastic support for Ms. O’Donnell may have hurt more than it helped: 46 percent of the state’s voters expressed opposition to the Tea Party, and two-thirds held an unfavorable impression of Ms. Palin.

Delaware’s voters are also noticeably less angry than those in other states. Two-thirds of those in the survey said they had a favorable view of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose seat Mr. Coons will fill, and nearly 60 percent said they approved of the job that President Obama is doing. “People don’t hate him,” Mr. Wilson said.

JOHN SCHWARTZ