"Philadelphia's already [turned out] 70 percent of what it did in 2000," Republican Sen. Rick Santorum reported, thumbing his BlackBerry near the end of an Election Day lunch. "That's not good."

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To win Pennsylvania, Santorum figured, President Bush needed to corral his southeastern Pennsylvania losses at about 350,000. That was roughly the margin former Vice President Al Gore took out of Philadelphia in 2000, but Gore then padded that lead with wins in three of the four once reliably Republican counties surrounding the state's largest city.

With a meticulous, well-funded organization, the GOP hoped to blunt those suburban defections Tuesday and battle Sen. John F. Kerry to a draw in the counties collaring Philadelphia. Instead, Kerry roared out of Philadelphia with a margin of roughly 400,000 votes, and the GOP's suburban holding action didn't hold. Bush carried Chester County by a little more than 10,000 votes. The GOP had hoped to double or triple that margin.

Bush lost Bucks County again; his combined deficits in Montgomery and Delaware counties climbed from about 60,000 in 2000 to almost 90,000. Add the three nearby counties in the Lehigh Valley and Bush came out of Southeastern Pennsylvania nearly half a million votes behind Kerry.

Looking at some of those early reporting numbers at around 10 p.m. on Tuesday, Santorum said it looked as if Bush would lose the state by 250,000 votes. He lost to Gore by just over 200,000 votes,

But through much of the rest of the state, another tide was surging. The Democratic candidate won Allegheny County by about the same margin as Gore did four years ago, but Bush's combined majority in other Western Pennsylvania counties grew by nearly 60,000 votes.

Bush's margins also climbed in the center of the state. His Lancaster County majority grew by 10,000. He padded his York County lead by about 15,000. It all netted out to a Kerry statewide majority of roughly 130,000 -- 2,885,077 to 2,755,150 in the complete, though still unofficial, returns.

That means that despite his battering in the Southeast, Bush significantly improved his standing over 2000.

The countervailing trends that have dominated the state's politics for the last decade had continued. Traditionally Republican counties in the Southeast accelerated their drift toward the Democrats. At the same time, the GOP tightened its hold on the state's center while making inroads in traditionally Democratic counties in the west.

The blue counties got bluer while the red counties got redder.

The next elections to test that trend are in two years when both Gov. Ed Rendell and Sen. Rick Santorum, the most powerful members of their respective parties in the state, are expected to defend their seats. Barring unforeseen events, both incumbents, despite very different political profiles, will be heavily favored.

Both races are consequential on their own terms, but they can also be expected to draw national attention because their incumbents are certain to be in the speculative mix on the makeup of the 2008 presidential tickets.

Rendell, a charismatic former prosecutor and mayor, presides over one of the two largest states in the nation with a Democratic governor. Santorum, while a polarizing figure to many voters, is a rock star to the conservative Christian base that was so important to Bush's re-election.

Both have well-established national and statewide fund-raising networks. And both can take credit for nurturing their parties' grass-roots political organizations.

Although former President Clinton won the state twice and Bob Casey Jr., who was one of Tuesday night's winners as well, won two terms as auditor general, Republicans dominated state elections through the 1990s, winning the races for governor, both Senate seats, two of the state's three row offices and an almost unbroken string of elected appellate court seats.

But the year after Rendell became the effective head of the party, he presided over a near sweep of the appellate court seats on the 2001 ballot.

Santorum, who was Bush's campaign manager in the state, heads to his re-election test with the advantage of having been at the center of the vast volunteer grass-roots effort assembled by the president's team. Unlike either Bush or former state Attorney General Michael Fisher, now a U.S. District Court judge, Santorum managed to win the Philadelphia suburbs in his 2000 re-election against former U.S. Rep. Ron Klink.

Rendell used Santorum's example as a lesson in not expecting political trends to extend from one race to another. By the same token, he said in a recent interview, Democrats such as Casey and Jack Wagner, the winning auditor general candidate Tuesday, have done well in some conservative-leaning communities.

Rendell may be challenged by former Lt. Gov. Bill Scranton III or by state Sen. Jeff Piccola, R-Dauphin. Santorum's potential opponents, mentioned by Rendell in an interview Friday, include Rep. Joe Hoeffel, who lost to Sen. Arlen Specter Tuesday, and state Treasurer Barbara Hafer, the former GOP gubernatorial candidate reborn as a Democrat after she endorsed Rendell over Fisher.

"Barbara Hafer would be a dynamite candidate. She would run really well in the Philadelphia suburbs and in the city itself," Rendell said.

Republicans are optimistic about a second re-election for Santorum, as Democrats are for Rendell, but the GOP can expect to face another uphill challenge in 2008 in making the arithmetic of Pennsylvania's shifting demographics add up in their favor even though Bush's showing in 2004 topped his 2000 effort.

"You look at that and you think it's pretty goods news," said one senior GOP strategist. "That's true, but the concern is, based on the money we raised and the [get-out-the-vote effort] we put on, we can't squeeze any more out of the red areas; we got everything we were going to get."

In Western Pennsylvania, Republicans can be heartened by the fact that their areas of growing strength include areas of growth in Butler and Westmoreland counties, for example. But statewide, the growth trends are more problematic for the GOP.

Its prime growth areas -- counties west of the Alleghenies -- are not growing as fast as the Democratic growth areas in the Philadelphia media market.

One Republican argued that in future statewide elections, particularly presidential contests, the GOP could hope to prevail only by stripping away votes in Democratic areas rather than in reinforcing Republican areas.

"We have to deal with the fact that this big East Coast city is going to continue to be part of an otherwise moderate to conservative state," he said. "We've talked in the past about trying to offset it; we're coming to realize that your can't offset it. The numbers are too big. So we have to take the battle there."