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Something happened on election night in Hamilton County that has only occurred three times since 1914.

A Democrat running for president got more than 50 percent of the vote.

Barack Obama won in a county with a storied tradition of Republican control — the first Democrat to do so since Lyndon Baines Johnson ran in 1964.

But Caleb Faux, executive director of the Hamilton County Democratic Party, said equally important is what Obama did in the rural, conservative counties surrounding Cincinnati.

He campaigned.

"The fatal mistake of (John) Kerry's campaign was to put all its efforts into Ohio's metropolitan counties," Faux said. "They made no effort in the outlying surrounding counties."

The different strategy this year paid off for the Democrats. Obama not only turned six so-called red counties blue, but he drew increased Democratic margins in 76 of the state's 88 counties when compared to 2004, according to a Dayton Daily News analysis of unofficial statewide voting totals.

Statewide, close to 323,000 voters swung blue from 2004 to 2008, according to the unofficial statewide totals. Those numbers do not include provisional ballots, which have yet to be counted.

Although 12 counties saw higher Republican votes for president, four of those still went for Obama. And some of the others, such as Clark County, didn't get the attention other counties were given this year. In 2004, both George W. Bush and Kerry made appearances in Clark County. Obama came during the primary this year, but neither candidate visited during the general election.

Former Clark County Republican chairman Dan Harkins acknowledges Obama had a great ground game. On the day of the election, he drove to Findlay on U.S. 68 and saw Obama campaign volunteers and staffers out on the streets in small cities like Bellefontaine.

Still, "with the amount of money raised (and spent), his margins weren't a blow-out," Harkins said.

But that was exactly the genius of the campaign's strategy, said Eric Rademacher, co-directer of the Institute for Policy Research and the University of Cincinnati.

The Obama strategy was simply to take votes where it could — by increasing margins in the counties that Kerry won and reducing Republican margins in the counties won by Bush.

"On election night, what I was focused on was the way the Bush counties from 2004 were coming in," Rademacher said. "About 1,000 here, 2,000 there. The number of votes on a county-by-county basis may have not seemed like a lot, but when you add them up as a whole across the state, it really makes a big difference."

Many of the counties that got redder in 2008 were in southeast Ohio — the same swing areas that helped hand Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland his victory in 2006. But those margins were much smaller than the blue shift; none was greater than 5 percentage points.

In Meigs County, Dale Colburn, former chair of the Meigs County Republican Party, watched John McCain garner more votes than George W. Bush did in 2004. He credits Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin with energizing Meigs County Republican voters.

"She didn't have any put-on," he said. "She was just 'Sarah' and that was it."

Obama, on the other hand, "didn't impress people as being one of us," he said.

But Obama did score gains in many Appalachian counties. John Hagner, who served as the field director for Sherrod Brown's successful 2006 campaign for U.S. senator, said the Obama campaign arrived early and stayed late, placing staffers in key locations.

Democrats found their most receptive audience in northwest Ohio, in small cities that had seen factory jobs vanish over the past eight years.

One Saturday, Hagner drove up to Henry County to visit Obama staffers there.

He found an office bustling, with 15 canvassers getting ready to go out and stump for Obama.

Down the hall, McCain's office was shuttered. The sign on the door read that the office was open for a few hours Mondays and Fridays.

"That told the entire story of their field organization," he said. "It didn't exist."

Hamilton County found another advantage in its large black community, which turned out in droves on Election Day.

The large Democratic turnout not only delivered the county for Obama; it helped unseat a longtime Republican U.S. congressman and garner a Statehouse seat.

But less than a week after the election, it's Obama's ground game that still leaves Caleb Faux amazed.

In the days before the election, Hillary Clinton recorded a robocall that informed individual voters where their polling place was.

"How you do that with 500 polling places in Hamilton County is beyond me," he said.

He has high hopes that Democrats will continue that success, both in 2010 and 2012.

"What we've done this year is cross a tipping point about perceptions in Hamilton County," he said. "And that will last for years to come."