PROVIDENCE -- Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse defeated incumbent Republican Lincoln D. Chafee yesterday to win Rhode Island's U.S. Senate race, ending the Chafee family's 30-year lock on the seat on a day when voters across the country rose up against President Bush and the Republican leadership that has run Washingtonfor six years.

Whitehouse, the 51-year-old former attorney general and U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island, comfortably outpolled Chafee, winning more than 193,000 votes to Chafee's 169,600 on a clear, warm day that drew a very large voter turnout for a midterm contest.

Journal photo / Ruben Perez

Sheldon Whitehouse, who defeated U.S. Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee, greets the crowd last night at the Providence Biltmore.

"I want to thank the people of Rhode Island for putting their trust in me," Whitehouse told a cheering crowd of Democrats who jammed the 17th-floor ballroom of the Providence Biltmore hotel. "I intend to go down to Washington and work my heart out for you each and every day."

Whitehouse also thanked Democratic U.S. House members James Langevin and Patrick Kennedy, both of whom won reelection yesterday, and Sen. Jack Reed, who campaigned diligently for Whitehouse.

Chafee said he went down to defeat in a Democratic "perfect storm" and expressed disappointment that his record was no match for anti-Bush sentiment. "The rage toward our president was insurmountable," said Chafee.

He said his one regret about the outcome is that "at least in the short-term I won't be part of the shrinking group" of moderates who "take their responsibility to govern more seriously than their personal ambitions."

"Our political system today is more deeply divided than any time in our history," Chafee said.

Chafee didn't even vote for Mr. Bush in 2004; instead he wrote in Mr. Bush's father, former president George H.W. Bush.

Whitehouse's historic victory followed a long and disciplined campaign in which he focused relentlessly on Chafee's Republican affiliation. While Chafee is perhaps the most liberal member of the national GOP and the only GOP member to vote against the Iraq war -- Whitehouse hammered the senator for backing conservative Republican leadership in the Senate.

The Whitehouse victory was also fueled by the best voter turnout operation the Democratic Party and Rhode Island labor unions have mounted in at least two decades, party leaders said. Every other Democratic statewide candidate running yesterday won, except Lt. Gov. Charles Fogarty, who gave Republican Governor Carcieri a much stronger challenge than preelection public opinion surveys had predicted.

Whitehouse won big in urban areas, including Providence, Central Falls, Pawtucket, North Providence, Johnston, West Warwick and in Chafee's home city of Warwick, as well as in the East Bay communities of Warren, Newport and Bristol. Chafee won most of the communities along Rhode Island's southern coast, including Little Compton, Charlestown, Portsmouth, North Kingstown, Exeter, New Shoreham, Jamestown and Hopkinton.

Whitehouse's victory broke a remarkable string of successful reelection campaigns by Rhode Island incumbents; Chafee is the first U.S. senator to be beaten here since 1936, during President Franklin Roosevelt's first term, when Democrat Theodore Francis Green ousted Republican Jesse Metcalf.

Just two Republicans have represented Rhode Island in the Senate since the Great Depression -- and both of them were named Chafee -- Lincoln Chafee and his late father, John H. Chafee.

Last night, Whitehouse thanked the Chafee family for a "very proud legacy of public service in Rhode Island."

From the start of the campaign, Whitehouse tuned the race to national issues -- the quagmire in Iraq, Mr. Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security, and issues dear to environmentalists and the elderly.

Chafee was never able to nimbly explain his support for a Republican leadership team that was the sworn enemy of his own agenda on Iraq, abortion rights and environmental policies.

When Chafee tried to portray himself as a maverick or play up his independent streak, Whitehouse called his bluff, saying that if he were really of independent mind he would have bolted the GOP, as did Vermont Sen. James M. Jeffords, and joined the Senate Democratic caucus.

Chafee had a torturous path to reelection; 14 months ago he acknowledged he had "a target on my back."

He survived a ferocious primary challenge from the right from Cranston Mayor Stephen P. Laffey, who had support and financing from national anti-tax and antiabortion groups.

But the primary split the state's small Republican base, which was not good for Chafee in a year when Democrats were unified, motivated and well-financed; Whitehouse faced only token primary opposition.

After the primary, Chafee positioned himself as a centrist, saying in television commercials that his views lay "in the middle" -- where he believed most Rhode Island voters are positioned.

In the waning weeks of the campaign, Chafee tried desperately to reshape the race and make it about local issues, lambasting Whitehouse's record as a state and federal prosecutor. Chafee accused Whitehouse of being soft on political corruption. At one point he posed with a photograph of a smiling Whitehouse hamming it up with former Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr., who was convicted on corruption charges and is now in federal prison in New Jersey.

Throughout the fusillade of negative Chafee attacks, Whitehouse stuck to his point: the only way to change Washington was to toss out Republican senators and House members. Because Rhode Island already has two Democrats in the House -- Langevin and Kennedy -- Whitehouse argued that the Senate race was crucial this year.

The nostrum that "all politics is local" -- variously attributed to former House Speaker Tip O'Neill or writer Finley Peter Dunne -- failed to account for yesterday's national results. This election resembled the 1974 post-Watergate anti-Nixon Democratic surge, the 1980 Ronald Reagan landslide or the 1994 Republican takeover of the U.S. House -- all elections in which national issues were paramount. A national exit poll conducted yesterday by CNN showed that 62 percent of voters said that national issues were more influential on their votes than local issues.

The race boiled down to a difficult choice for many Rhode Islanders. While Chafee was well-liked and seemed to mirror Rhode Islanders' views on a wide spectrum of issues, he was saddled with the Republican label in a year when the GOP and the Bush administration's policies are anathema to many New Englanders.

President Bush's job approval rating in Rhode Island was a dismal 23 percent in a SurveyUSA public opinion poll taken last month, the lowest of any state in the nation. His approval numbers have hovered in the low- to mid-20s for the last year, and there is scant support for the U.S. military intervention in Iraq.

On his way in to vote at Hall Manor in the Edgewood section of Cranston, Jason Burns, 24, Cranston summed up this dilemma and still sounded undecided. "I'm split evenly," he said, between Chafee and Whitehouse. "Linc Chafee is one of the most honest and trustworthy politicians. But he's a Republican and votes for a Republican agenda. I might not decide until I get in there. Maybe I'll fill out the whole ballot first, and save that race for last."

Over his heart, Burns wore a button with the photograph of Lance Cpl. Holly A. Charette, a U.S. Marine from Cranston, who died last year in Iraq. Charette was his cousin, he said.

He emerged minutes later after voting. "I went with Sheldon," he reported. "As much as I appreciate what Linc Chafee has done, we need change. We're ready for change."

Making a day-long tour of polling places yesterday, Whitehouse stopped for about 30 minutes at Hall Manor and personally thanked 18-year-old first-time voter Corbin McGrath for giving him his very first vote.

McGrath offered a straightforward explanation: "I want Democratic control of the Senate," he said. "I don't like the Iraq war and I want to get [American troops] out of there. I think Democratic control of the Senate will do that."

The Senate combatants had much in common. Chafee, 53, is a former Warwick mayor who was appointed senator in 1999 by then-Gov. Lincoln C. Almond upon the death of his father, Sen. John Chafee, a much-revered Republican who also served three terms as governor in the 1960s.

Whitehouse has a long government rsum, including service as Gov. Bruce Sundlun's legal counsel during the state banking crisis of the early 1990s, as Sundlun's director of business regulation and, later, as U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island. In 1998, Whitehouse was elected state attorney general and served four years. In 2002, he ran unsuccessfully for governor, losing the Democratic primary to Myrth York, a former state senator from Providence.

A graduate of Phillips Andover Academy and Brown University, Chafee hails from a pedigreed Yankee clan, as does Whitehouse. Their fathers, John Chafee and Charles Whitehouse, a foreign service officer and ambassador to Laos and Cambodia, were college roommates at Yale. Sheldon Whitehouse, too, was educated at Yale after prep school at St. Paul's. He earned a law degree from the University of Virginia.

Whitehouse seemed relaxed on his final day of campaigning, wearing an open collared shirt and a blue blazer. He said he slept well Monday night, after a late-night political rally with former President Bill Clinton. "I got a full four hours' sleep," Whitehouse said with a wry smile. He said he was very confident in the Democratic turnout operation, though "you never know until you see the team in action. There's only one game to be played, and it's the Super Bowl."

Whitehouse shook hands with a few voters, chatted with U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, who was making the rounds for Democrats at polling places yesterday.

"It is a very strong turnout and that's a very good Democratic sign," said Reed, at 11:30 a.m. yesterday.