COLUMBUS — As the crowd at the downtown Hyatt roared, a jubilant Gov. Bob Taft said Tuesday that Republican volunteers did their part and “made Ohio signed, sealed and delivered” for George W. Bush.

        “We did it,” an enthusiastic Mr. Taft yelled. “We've done our part.”

        Mr.Taft credited 22,000 volunteers across the state for getting out the vote for Mr. Bush and said Republicans had an “unprecedented grass-roots organization in Ohio.”

        Mr. Bush beat Vice President Al Gore in Ohio, 52 percent to 46 percent.

        Kara Gerhardt, a spokeswoman for the Gore campaign, said Democrats faced an uphill battle in Ohio because “Republicans had the advantage of more money and all the statewide office holders.”

        Still, she said, “we fought a good battle and had a huge number of volunteers with a lot of energy.”

        Mr. Taft, chairman of the Ohio Bush campaign, said the state went strongly for Mr. Bush because “we had a strategy to win early and some of the finest people around working on the campaign.”

        Confident that Mr. Bush would emerge victorious, Ohio Republican leaders and operatives packed into a downtown Hyatt Regency Tuesday night eager to start the victory celebration.

        But as the race continued to be tight throughout the evening, the party instead remained subdued with the crowd glued to large-screen TVs waiting on results.

        Attorney General Betty Montgomery — watching Mr. Gore win several key battleground states — said the vice president benefited from his attempts to scare voters into believing Mr. Bush was not ready to lead and also from the entertainment industry's backing of Mr. Gore.

        An abortion-rights supporter, Ms. Montgomery added that Mr. Bush's stand against abortion also cost him big.

        “Frankly, that loses us a lot of votes among women,” she said. “We're perceived as being hard-hearted.”

        Supporters of the governor had sailed through the last week happily reciting polls that put Mr. Bush comfortably ahead in the state by six to nine percentage points.

        “Al Gore came out of the Democratic convention with a populist theme, attacking the evil special interests and being anti-big institutions,” said John Green, director of the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron. “Ohioans tend to respect institutions.”

        He said Democrats should have instead stressed Ohio's prosperity. “They came back to prosperity in the waning days, but they should have stressed early how far Ohio has come.”

        He added Mr. Bush ran his campaign much like popular Ohio politicians U.S. Sen. George Voinovich and Gov. Taft.

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