ORLANDO (By Brian E. Crowley, Palm Beach Post Political Editor) November 07, 2004 - Mel Martinez was worried. Months of campaigning and dreams of being the first Cuban-American to go to the United States Senate seemed to be slipping away.

Three hours after the last voters had gone to the polls, Martinez saw results that didn't look promising as he sat in his Election Night war room on the sixth floor of Orlando's downtown Embassy Suites hotel.

According to Stuart Stevens, the man who crafted Mel Martinez's television campaign ads, voters liked the candidate's story about being a Cuban refugee living the American dream, and his strong stance on terrorism.

Teams of staffers sat before a dozen computers, some working the phones, others studying the vote count as it trickled in. Boxes that once held pizzas, the fuel of every campaign, were stacked in the corner.

"I was feeling a little concerned," Martinez said later, aboard his campaign plane in the midst of a victory lap around the state. "But it didn't last long."

With all but the overseas absentee ballots counted, Republican Martinez wound up beating Democrat Betty Castor by 83,595 votes. More than 7.4 million voters cast their ballots in deciding who would replace retiring Democrat Bob Graham. Martinez's margin of victory was just 1.1 percent.

Much of the foundation for his narrow win had been laid in the primary, when he courted religious conservatives by playing to their opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion, and to their determination to see federal courts packed with conservative judges.

On Tuesday, Martinez easily won every Central time zone county in the Panhandle, leapfrogged the more liberal counties centered on Tallahassee, home of Florida State University, and swept east across North Florida, winning everything but Alachua County, the home of the University of Florida.

He won them over with his message of social conservatism and by creating the impression that he would be tougher than Castor on terrorism and on Iraq.

If his campaign appeared to mirror that of President Bush, it was no coincidence. The architect of Bush's campaign, Karl Rove, had recruited Martinez personally to run. The president also had urged his then-Housing and Urban Development secretary to enter the race.

Although Bush and Martinez used the same 2004 playbook, Martinez brought another weapon to the game: his appeal to Hispanics, especially South Florida Cubans.

Rove believed Martinez would help Bush with the Cuban-American community, but the election results suggest that Bush may have been of more help to Martinez.

Martinez plowed through turf that had been won easily four years earlier by Democrat Bill Nelson, who won 37 of Florida's 67 counties when he defeated Republican Bill McCollum in the 2000 Senate race.

Castor won just 19 counties this year. And in those she did win, she didn't manage the kind of margin of victory that Nelson did before her.

Most notable was Miami-Dade County, where the large Cuban-American population appears to have gone for Martinez in a big way.

In 2000, Nelson won the county by about 41,000 votes. In 2004, Castor lost it by nearly 2,500 votes.

Additional evidence that Martinez probably pulled the Hispanic vote in Miami-Dade is that, while Castor lost the county, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry won there by 47,486 votes.

If Castor had done as well as Kerry in Miami-Dade, the margin in Florida would have been less than 0.5 percent, enough to require a statewide recount.

The Miami-Dade numbers also suggest that Martinez was of little help to the president there.

Castor aides said she ran well among blacks, women, the elderly, in South Florida and in portions of the I-4 corridor, but fell behind in North Florida and the Panhandle.

They noted that she did better statewide than Kerry, who trailed Bush by 5 percent in the state, but the aides said it was not unusual for a Democratic Senate candidate to out-poll the presidential candidate in Florida.

Democrats entered the race with an edge in voter registration. As of Oct. 4, there were 4.3 million Democrats and 3.9 million Republicans in Florida, according to the state elections division. Voters registered with neither party total about 2.1 million.

But Martinez, like Bush, did a better job than his opponent in getting out his base.

In Martin County, he beat Castor by nearly 10,000 votes, whereas McCollum beat Nelson there in 2000 by fewer than 7,000 votes. He won Clay County by about 37,000 votes, compared with the 23,000 by which McCollum beat Nelson.

And he won his home county of Orange County by 660 votes, whereas Nelson stole it from McCollum by about 21,000 votes in 2000.

Castor, meanwhile, took St. Lucie County by slightly more than 6,000 votes, compared with the 8,000 votes Nelson won by in 2000. She won Volusia by about 11,000, compared with Nelson's 13,000.

The results in South Florida's big Democratic counties were slightly better for Castor, but they weren't enough.

Castor won Palm Beach County by 118,000 votes, only a slight increase over Nelson's margin of 116,000, even though the number of registered Democrats had increased substantially since 2000. According to state Division of Election records, the number of registered Democrats in the county grew by 11.5 percent, from 295,185 in 2000 to 329,232 for this general election, while the number of Republicans grew by only 1 percent, from 231,233 to 233,495.

Similarly in Broward County, Castor won by 211,000 votes, whereas Nelson won by 203,000.

Castor's defeat left her advisers assessing their campaign strategy.

Castor media strategist Doug Hattaway said he was pleased that the election ended with the candidates focusing primarily "on her issues," including the minimum wage, Social Security, job protection and other domestic matters.

And he defended what may have been the Castor campaign's most controversial tactic: to open the door to a debate over her handling, while she was University of South Florida president, of Sami Al-Arian, a university professor suspected of being a terrorist sympathizer and financier. She suspended him with pay for two years, even though he was never charged with any crime until after she left the university.

Castor's campaign came out with the first ad on the issue as a sort of preemptive strike. An advertising war over whether her action was tough enough ensued, consuming the first three weeks of October and still lingering on Election Day.

"We were going to have that debate regardless," Hattaway said. "The idea was to try to get through it sooner, rather than later, and from the debates on, we were on our issues."

But Tre Evers, a political strategist for Martinez, said the tactic failed because Castor "made the critical mistake of not admitting that she could have done something different. I think people like someone to be an honest broker about an issue that directly affects them."

Stuart Stevens, who crafted Martinez's television ads, said Martinez won because people liked his story about being a Cuban refugee who is living the American dream.

That, plus the fact that the campaign stayed on message about the war on terrorism, Stevens said.

"Once she opened it up," he said, referring to the Al-Arian issue, "we knew we had it."