Whitehouse wins Chafee's Senate seat

PROVIDENCE -- Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic candidate for US Senate in Rhode Island, unseated Senator Lincoln Chafee yesterday in a hard-fought race that made the Republican incumbent's party affiliation the key issue.

When Whitehouse takes office in January, it will mark the first time in more than 30 years that Rhode Island has not sent a Chafee to the US Senate.

With 97 percent of precincts reporting late last night, Whitehouse had 53 percent of the vote to Chafee's 47 percent. Chafee conceded just before midnight, ascribing his defeat to factors including "rage against our president."

In a victory speech in a hotel ballroom, Whitehouse credited the Chafee family with a "very long, proud legacy of public service."

"I intend to go to Washington and work my heart out for you every day," he said as hundreds of supporters punched the air with their fists.

Polling places reported heavier than average traffic as Rhode Islanders defeated a ballot question to allow construction of a casino and voted for candidates in a slew of races, including a neck-and-neck contest for governor and four other statewide positions.

But for many inside and outside Rhode Island, the biggest issue was the Senate race. Chafee, a liberal Republican who has often bucked the Bush administration, faced a fierce challenge by Whitehouse.

Both candidates stood in the chill outside polling places yesterday making final pitches to voters. As recently as late last week, Democrats were optimistic that Whitehouse, 51, would unseat Chafee, but subsequent public opinion polls suggested the race had tightened and was virtually even.

"For the last two years, I've expected a very competitive race," Chafee, 53, said in an interview outside his childhood elementary school in Warwick, as voters entered the building. "Rhode Island is very hard for Republicans, and this year, it's triply hard."

Chafee recognized many of the people voting in the Potowomut School, no surprise in tiny Rhode Island, where six degrees of separation is a chasm.

"All right, Lincoln, that was the vote that put you over the top," Edward Foley, a 60-year-old former neighbor of Chafee's, said as he left after voting with his mother, Betty Foley, 88, both of Warwick. Chafee smiled and thanked him. Edward Foley, a retired photographer, said he has known Chafee "since Moby Dick was a minnow." He said, "I might not always agree with him, but he's his own man."

That's the message that Chafee drove home for months as he defeated a feisty conservative Republican in the primary and waged an increasingly bitter campaign against Whitehouse, a former US attorney and onetime state attorney general.

Chafee, a son of the late senator John Chafee, one of the last of the liberal northeastern GOP members of Congress known as Rockefeller Republicans, was the lone Republican senator to vote against the war in Iraq, and he has opposed President Bush on numerous issues, including abortion rights, the environment, and the legalization of gay marriage. He even voted against Bush's reelection in 2004, writing in the name of Bush's father.

Whitehouse and Chafee have much in common, including personal pedigrees. Both are graduates of prestigious New England prep schools and Ivy League colleges. Chafee's father and Whitehouse's father, Charles Whitehouse, a foreign service officer and ambassador, were college roommates at Yale.

Even some Whitehouse supporters said the most important factor was their personal impression of the candidates, not party affiliations.

Michael Cortellessa, a 48-year-old disabled Marine veteran and Democrat, said he disliked the way Chafee ended up in the Senate. Chafee was appointed in 1999 by a Republican governor to fill the vacancy created by his father's death; he won a full six-year term the following year.

"He was just born into it," Cortellessa said of Lincoln Chafee. "His father was the real deal."

But Jack Corey, a building inspector for Warwick who worked under Chafee when the latter was mayor there in the 1990s, said he was voting for Chafee.

Corey noted that Chafee opposed Bush on the war in Iraq, and "they said, 'Look at this dope.' But he was right."