STATE VOTERS sounded off loud and clear Tuesday night when they sent Mitt Romney to the governor’s office by five percentage points, and this is what they said: they do not fear the "values" of Republican Mitt Romney, as Senator John Kerry suggested they might. They do not want to listen to former president Bill Clinton, who appeared in Massachusetts twice for the Democratic candidate, Treasurer Shannon O’Brien. They are not persuaded by Senator Ted Kennedy, who campaigned with O’Brien during the last five days of the campaign. They were not convinced by Senator Hillary Clinton, who criticized Romney for calling O’Brien’s behavior at the last debate "unbecoming." In short, voters repudiated the prevailing stereotype of Massachusetts as a liberal state.

Romney’s margin of victory was far greater than anyone — pundits and pollsters alike, most of whom thought the race was a dead heat — thought he would get. It doesn’t look quite as bad if Green Party candidate for governor Jill Stein’s three percent of the votes are added to O’Brien’s. Then the final results more or less mirror the two-point victory Paul Cellucci won over Scott Harshbarger in 1998. Except, that is, for the fact that Stein’s supporters wanted nothing to do with O’Brien.

As for the ballot questions, the oft-ridiculed Question One, which called for the elimination of the state income tax, lost by a relatively slim 53 percent to 47 percent. It was predicted to lose by a two-to-one margin. Question Two, which eliminates bilingual education in Massachusetts in favor of English "immersion," garnered the support of more than 70 percent of the electorate.

Taken as a whole, the result may not be as startling as when William Weld rode to victory in 1990 on a rising tide of Republican state lawmakers, but it’s close. And the larger point is that Romney is "old-fashioned," as he put it during one of the gubernatorial debates when expressing his opposition to same-sex marriage. Voters don’t seem to mind. On the contrary: they’ve just given the nod to the most conservative governor since Ed King, who won in 1978.

THAT SAID, the conservative tide was not inevitable. In the postmortems on the 2002 election in Massachusetts, there is likely to be plenty of finger-pointing. Some, such as Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh, will blame O’Brien’s defeat on sexism, as Marsh did just moments after it became clear the treasurer would lose. Others will fault O’Brien’s aggressive debate performance last week and "the smirk." Perhaps, suggested the headline on Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi’s piece Wednesday, VOTERS SIMPLY DIDN’T LIKE O’BRIEN. Still others will posit that a wave of anti–Beacon Hill sentiment led to O’Brien’s demise. All these factors deserve at least a share of the blame.

But the central flaw in O’Brien’s campaign was much more basic. Prior to Tuesday night, even a child could have told you who decides statewide elections — suburban independents. And a child — well, a recent college graduate — did: Princeton senior Sarah Kahan demonstrated through statistical analysis that "suburban managerial professionals" decided the governor’s races from 1990 through 1998 (see "Unconventional Wisdom," News and Features, May 30). Her conclusion? Fiscal concerns trump social issues. Remember, 51 percent of state voters are independents; just 36 percent are Democrats. (At least two powerful Democratic politicians are social conservatives, House Speaker Tom Finneran and Ways and Means chair John Rodgers.) And John McCain, a Republican, got almost as many votes as Al Gore in the 2000 Massachusetts presidential primary.

O’Brien and company — that is, Democratic State Party chair Phil Johnston — purported to get it. Unlike Harshbarger in 1998, O’Brien paid lip service to the idea of reaching out to independent voters. She mentioned them both in her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in June and after her primary victory in September. Johnston, meanwhile, vowed that party unity would all but guarantee a victory against Romney, whom he suggested might even be easier to beat than former governor Paul Cellucci. Romney himself created an opening for O’Brien by squandering millions of dollars on foolish ads stressing his love affair with his wife, Ann, and showing him "participating" in a string of ridiculously staged workdays. Romney was there for the taking.

But it didn’t happen. As soon as the general election began in earnest, the promising picture O’Brien put forward during much of the primaries evaporated into the ether. When the race tightened, a new O’Brien came forward. She ran not as the tough fiscal manager who could fix the state’s budget process, but as the State House insider who had the "values" to work on behalf of Massachusetts’s "working families." In the final days, she campaigned heavily in urban enclaves, exhorting minorities and labor-union members to vote for her. By the end of the race, it became clear that she was no longer running as O’Brien. She had morphed into state Senate president Tom Birmingham, the man she trounced in the Democratic primary. But she had no more success running as Birmingham 2.0 than the original did in the primary.