Governor Carcieri fended off a challenge from Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty yesterday to win a second term in office by a razor-thin margin.

The Democratic lieutenant governor landed 49 percent of the vote, leaving the Republican governor with 51 percent, according to unofficial results from the state Board of Elections. Early this morning, with all voting precincts reporting and all mail ballots counted, Fogarty trailed Carcieri by fewer than 8,000 votes.

Journal photo / Bob Breidenbach

Governor Carcieri delivers his victory speech early this morning at The Crowne Plaza Hotel after a close win over Lt. Gov. Charles Fogarty.

At the Crowne Plaza hotel in Warwick, where state Republicans gathered last night, Carcieri waited until 12:45 a.m., after more than 14,000 mail ballots were tallied, to speak to supporters. He started his victory speech with: "My name is Don Carcieri, and I'm still your governor.'' He called the race a "nail-biter'' and said it was down to the wire.

Carcieri spoke for less than 10 minutes. "I had a half hour speech," he said, "but I don't know about you, but I'm pretty tired."

At the Providence Biltmore, Fogarty supporters waited in the ballroom on the hotel's 17th floor, milling around, hugging and wiping teary eyes.

A few minutes before Fogarty entered the room, his campaign finance director, Rick McAuliffe, pumped up the crowd. "I want to thank each and every one of you for trying to bring change to Rhode Island!" he bellowed into the microphone. "Charlie Fogarty took a governor with a 63 percent approval rating and took him down to the wire. We brought him down to mail ballots!"

Speaking offstage, Fogarty's State House policy director, Maureen Maigret, also noted the closeness of the race. "I wouldn't say it's exactly a mandate for Carcieri," she said.

Fogarty and his staff emerged from a private suite just before 1 a.m., to cheers of "Char-lie! Char-lie!"

"I made the prediction that this race would be 51-49," Fogarty said, "but I had the numbers a little bit backwards, folks."

Fogarty said he phoned Carcieri to congratulate him, wish him well in his second term, "and to offer my support in efforts to move Rhode Island forward."

Fogarty also said he made significant progress from his first poll, in January of this year, which showed him 22 points behind Carcieri. "We didn't want to tell anybody that," he said with a smile.

After Fogarty left the stage, another of finance director McAuliffe's earlier comments had reporters buzzing. McAuliffe said Fogarty "will be back in four years – you can count on that."

Fogarty declined to say what, specifically, McAuliffe might have meant. "I'm a young man," he said. "I love public service. I would love to have the opportunity, at some point, to continue."

Fogarty, 51, was a state Senator for eight years before serving two four-year terms as lieutenant governor.

The race turned out to be much closer than recent polls predicted, indicating many undecided poll respondents may have decided to vote for Fogarty. Most recently, a poll by Fleming & Associates found that 50 percent of probable voters polled favored Carcieri, and 41 percent Fogarty.

Carcieri's victory came in spite of high turnout, which generally hurts Republican candidates in this heavily Democratic state. More than 380,000 people voted yesterday, more than in any midterm election here in recent years.

In the general election two years ago, when voters came out in droves to support John F. Kerry, the 440,372 votes cast ensured that Kerry carried Rhode Island. Two years before that, in the midterm election in which Carcieri captured the governorship, a total of 337,027 votes were cast.

The victory also makes Carcieri the only Republican on the statewide ticket to win, and thus avoid the wave of anti-Republican sentiment that played a role in sweeping U.S. Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee from office.

Fogarty tried throughout the campaign to forge a rhetorical link between Carcieri and the national-level Republicans most reviled by Democrats — Karl Rove, President Bush, etc. Carcieri typically responded by reminding Fogarty that Bush and Rove weren't on the ballot in Rhode Island.

A second term for Carcieri means four more years of a Republican administration in a state where Republicans have held the governor's office for 18 of the last 22 years. (The only Democratic governor during that stretch was Bruce Sundlun.)

In contrast to the U.S. Senate race, the governor's race was relatively clean. Carcieri cultivated an image as a family man, running commercials featuring his wife, Suzanne, and their 13 grandchildren. Fogarty ran some humorous ads, including one in which he used a megaphone to make a point about "turning up the volume" of his anticorruption message, and one in which he picked up trash and squeegeed windshields in another literal interpretation of a rhetorical theme — this time, cleaning up state government.

The most negative ads swirled around an ethics-in-government bill that Fogarty made a pillar of his campaign platform. Carcieri attacked the bill as not having gone far enough because it required only state general officers, and not lawmakers, to disclose the amount of their personal income. Also, Carcieri maintains that officials should have to disclose the identities of their business clients — a requirement that would essentially apply only to General Assembly members, most of whom supplement their part-time lawmaker salaries with other work. Fogarty's bill did not address that issue, so Carcieri deemed it the "Fogarty loophole" in a TV ad that also included an image of a door bearing a sign that said, "Charlie Fogarty. Restricted area.. Backroom deals in progress."

Fogarty decried that ad, but one that came later caused even more of a stir. The Republican Governors Association stepped in to denounce the Fogarty ethics bill, in an ad that made it sound as if Fogarty created the loophole, instead of just preserving it. Carcieri's camp disavowed any connection with the ad, but not before the good-government watchdog group Common Cause of Rhode Island declared the ad misleading.

Rather than attacking Carcieri's perceived weaknesses, Fogarty went after things Carcieri had portrayed as strengths: ethics in government, job growth, tax relief. One day during the campaign, both candidates held news conferences on their respective plans to reform the state's ethics laws and rules for public officials.

Carcieri touted a record of standing up to the General Assembly – —for instance, by vetoing two state budgets and a bill that would have required the state to engage in collective bargaining with child-care providers. Fogarty said Carcieri made unilateral decisions and didn't work well with others; he said his own good relationship with Democratic leaders in the General Assembly would make him a more effective governor.

At the same time, Fogarty slammed Carcieri for signing into law a tax cut for the state's top wage earners, even though that proposal came from the House leadership.

Carcieri, 63, had a 35-year career in the corporate world, first at Old Stone Bank and then at Cookson America, where he was chief executive officer from 1991 until his retirement in 1997. He campaigned hard on his Big Audit of state government and on changes the General Assembly made to the state employee pension plan at Carcieri's request – — changes that Carcieri says will save taxpayers half a billion dollars in a few years' time.

In a second Carcieri term, he has said he'll push for further change to pensions for newly hired state employees.

As of last week, each candidate had spent about $2 million on the race. Carcieri spent more than $1 million of his own money on the 2002 race, but raised enough in private donations to cover all the costs this time around, at least heading into the campaign's final week. Fogarty had raised just over $800,000 and had received nearly $900,000 in public matching funds.

-- With reports from Journal staff writers Tom Mooney and Steve Peoples.